Conversation Partner Blog #2
9/9/2014
Last Tuesday I had a conversation with Henrique who is a fairly advanced English speaking student. He studied in London for a year and thus has a good speaking knowledge of English. However, it was many years ago and he has forgotten some of the rules and knows words that are specific to British English and not American. It is interesting to hear some of the differences! Since he is not used to daily practice in his country he has to listen much more intently to understand normal English conversation, and has said that vocabulary words he used to know do not come as quickly to him. While he is a very good speaker, he still has some conversation moments where I can tell he is thinking harder to explain himself. I can relate to this as it takes me a while to form sentences in Português that I used to quickly be able to speak. Since I have not had steady practice with speaking in about two years I struggle to remember as well. This reaffirms to me that when you learn as an adult (especially!) you have to use the language in order to remember it.
Henrique is an entrepreneur. During our conversation I taught him this word. We spoke about some of his role models and other entrepreneurs in the United States, such as Ted Turner. This came up when I was telling him about a restaurant that my family and I went to the night before (Ted’s). I told him about bison burgers – another new term for him, even though he did recognize the animal when I showed a picture on Google.
One of my observations with his English is that he tends to confuse pronouns quite a bit in his speaking. One example I have from our last conversation was when he needed to use the word she, but used hers instead. The sentence had been singular, so it would have either been she or her, but he made it plural with hers. It is not that big of deal to me because I can still understand him. He asked me to correct his mistakes though so I am doing that. I think this is a fairly common issue with non-native English speakers and I have noticed it with others. I believe some of it is because of the different verb forms used in speaking and the feminine/masculine case of nouns that are sometimes dependent in other languages based on gender of the speaker(s) and how many of them there are. This is one of the biggest difficulties I have in learning other languages – when to use which form of the verb and if a word is masculine or feminine. But, the difficulty could be from something else too. In general, learning languages can be much more difficult as we get older.
He is very interested in American culture and follows quite a bit of what is happening here. One of the recent interests of him - and many other Brazilians - is the ice bucket challenge that has been circulating in the United States. This has made its way down to Brazil and many are taking part in this challenge or other forms of it. Some are more like dares than the actual challenges. Pretty neat though - to both of us, anyway - to see how quickly it has caught on and spread thanks to the world wide web. This probably would not have been the case a few years ago.
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