Jappo En

My name is Jacopo Bettinelli, aka Jappo (pr. Yappo), and I am the “B” in ABCina.

I was born in 1987 in a small Italian town not far from Milan, and since my parents are unstoppable backpackers and travelers, I learned to love different cultures since I was too young to remember. Once I turned 12 they literally sent me in England after asking me: “aren’t you too old to spend holidays with your elders?”

It was the beginning of the end.

From that moment I never stopped travelling, every year I spent the summer in a different country: Malta, USA, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Australia (twice). Partly because of this and partly because my dad cannot speak properly any foreign language but he always find a way to communicate with anybody (he can even manage some German and some Russian!), I decided to put aside my scientific studies I started in high-school and pick a university of foreign languages.

It was even before the beginning of the senior year, when we spent 3 weeks in Kyrgyzstan and I fell in love for Asia and it became very clear to me that I was supposed to study Chinese. I moved to Venice in 2006 and started to attend the best course in Italy about “Asian languages, laws and economies”. At that time most of the people was treating me like a weirdo because I was studying something so particular, but after only 5 years from that very moment I found out that Chinese it is taught even in some Italian high-schools (!).

When in 2009 I was getting ready for my first term in a Chinese university there were a lot of relatives and friends who were asking to receive updates about this experience, therefore I decided to start a mailing list which is growing since then and it has become a part of this blog (at the moment it is available only in Italian, Beijing 2009, Nanjing 2010, Beijing 2011).

What else I can say? Enjoy this blog!