Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Conversation Partner Update
Totally spaced about blogging about my last meeting with my conversation partner, Young Kim. Last week before fall break we met in the library again. I helped her with her English homework which was working on saying negative sentences. I forgot how hard it is to explain what "should not" means! Some words that we use everyday can be extremely hard to explain, especially not knowing any Korean. Anyways, I also worked with her on her pronounciation skills. She read a little story to me and did really well! The difficult parts were pronoucing spanish words like San Antonio and El Paso. Totally understandable since she's trying to learn English and not Spanish! That just made me realize how cultures can just intermix and now those words become a part of our everyday language. Thank goodness that Mexico and the US shared some of their cultures, what would I do without queso?!
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Lisa, I like how you wrote some about how difficult it is to explain English grammar- it is an interesting perspective! Like you touched on, I think that it is easy to forget about certain aspects of our language that may be difficult for non-native speakers. Forgetting this makes it hard to communicate and try to translate what someone may be trying to say.
ReplyDeleteThis reminded me of a recent experience I had with Spanish. I was trying to understand a grammatical concept, yet I was having difficulty so I asked a friend who is from a Spanish-speaking country to explain. He stared at my workbook for a second, and then looked up with a baffled expression. He told me that he could not find the words to explain how it worked, as it was just something he felt when he talked.
Like in your experience with Young, this experience with my Spanish friend made me realize that when you grow up with a language, it is much easier to understand than it is when you try and learn it after the fact. I think that this is something that we all learned from our conversation partners. The fact that they are working so hard to understand the English language, with all its oddities, is something truly admirable!