Erasing borders

Erasing Borders
written by Santiago Pablo Apiolazza
Media producer, photographer and simultaneous interpreter
pabloapiolazza@gmail.com
http://heyquetal.blogspot.com



"Well, I am a filmmaker, I worked as a digital artist (motion graphics, cgi) most of my career and lately as a producer. I am also a spanish-english simultaneous interpreter, and a big language freak. I had english lessons pretty much since kindergarden, both french and english in high school, my ancestry is from Italy, so I also had a good grip on italian when I was a kid. I speak spanish as a mother tongue and then I've got interested in german so I started taking lessons. After that I took norwegian lessons, and nowadays I'm also learning dutch, because in a long term I'd like to go live to Amsterdam, my dream city.
To have that amount of languages to learn and practice can be really hard, so in order to keep up I discovered that podcasts are a good method to practice or at least have some regularity.

On the other hand, my job and life itself gave me the chance to meet and be friends with a lot of foreigners from all over the world. Buenos Aires is a very touristic city, and lots of people come here to learn spanish. The thing I first noticed about them, was that once they were gone, they began to lose all the knowledge that they got here. And some of them were really interested in learning the language, so I always thought it was a pity, and it made me want to do something about it.
If you think about it, the current times don't give people many chances to spend time in language learning, so even with the initiative, some people just don't have the time to go to take lessons, and therefor they miss the chance to learn.
It is also amazing that spanish is the most spoken language (as a mother tongue) in the world after mandarin. And even so, it's not that easy to find free resources to learn it.
I strongly believe that knowing a language is not only a way to communicate, but also a way to understand a culture. So this way I try to help people to get together. To make the gaps smaller.

In my podcasts I also try to share some of the culture and traditions of Argentina, and mostly Buenos Aires, because that's what I know the most.

Maybe it is a big goal, but this is my little sand grain to make people together."