My second tutoring session was with Mohammed, who was from Saudi Arabia. Mohammed simply wanted to review some vocabulary from his class. The parts he was struggling were understandable and common amongst language learners: pronunciation and understanding the subtle differences between words. Mohammed and I were able to come up with lots of example sentences, and I demonstrated a lot of words for him, sometimes pulling up pictures on my computer. Example sentences really helped Mohammed understand, especially when he was able to reproduce them himself. As for pronunciation, he would start by saying the word, and I would correct him if need be and talk about how the pronunciation can vary between regions. As we continued practicing, Mohammed was definitely understanding better and picking up on patterns. It was good to review the things he had learned in class and build off of that with new vocabulary and pronunciation practice.
My third conversation partner meeting was with Josue, my conversation partner from Paris, France. He suggested that we go to a restaurant for this meeting, and recommended the Colombian restaurant on Tennessee St. called "Super Perros". I had never been to this restaurant before, so it was interesting to not only converse with someone from outside of my culture but also at a cultural restaurant with an atmosphere and menu different than what I am used to. Most of the menu was in Spanish, so we were able to bond over trying to figure out what the menu was saying, and ended up sharing a lot of laughs over it. During our meeting, we caught up on how he was doing at CIES, what he's involved in in Tallahasee, and discussed deeper topics such as the current political affairs going on in France. This led to a grander discussion about American politics, and it turned out we had similar views. It was interesting to connect our ideas across border lines, realizing we all want the ...
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