Denily and I had
our last meeting of the semester the other day. It has been awesome getting to
know her just by meeting up and talking for an hour. We hadn’t met for a few
weeks due to conflicts and Thanksgiving, of course, so we exchanged stories
about the previous weeks. Denily went to Houston for Thanksgiving Break where
she has a friend from Venezuela. Like many other people, she had the misfortune
of Black Friday shopping. When I asked her why she went, she basically told me
she went just for the experience. She didn’t buy anything and she wasn’t
looking for anything, but she went to know what it’s like. I would never do
that. Over break, I was convinced to go pseudo-shopping with my sister, and I
was ready to be done after 20 minutes. I have never understood the pleasure of
shopping for hours, but that’s fine with me. I’ll save my time and money!
Denily shared a
funny story about towels on Black Friday. She said that she saw a bunch of
people rushing for a huge pile of discounted towels. I didn’t think anyone had
ever been excited about towels until Denily told me the story. She could not
understand why people were grabbing lots of towels. Neither can I!
Denily is already
getting excited about her travel over Christmas Break. She is going to Florida
with her family for a few weeks and then will return to Venezuela for the
remainder of the time. Right now, it looks like she will only be at TCU for one
more semester. Her English is advanced enough that I think she could make it
wherever she went, at least to communicate well enough. Denily has some pretty
ambitious plans for after TCU as well; she wants to go to a university in
Houston to get an MBA because her good friend is there, and she wants to be
able to stay there instead of Fort Worth. Transferring schools will, of course,
require her to take the TOEFL in order to be accepted to the MBA program in
addition to the GRE. Without any business experience, I wonder how she will be
able to handle this transition. I think she could do it, but I hope the business
jargon does not confuse her when she gets to that point.
Denily finishes up
her exams next Wednesday, so she’s excited to be done. She had her writing exam
just yesterday (Wednesday), so she told me about it. She accidentally answered
the question somewhat incorrectly by writing about her favorite vacation spot
in Venezuela, whereas the question asked her favorite abroad vacation spot. She
said she has become so comfortable with English that she sometimes overlooks
things like this. There are some benefits to not knowing a language very well!
Anyway, we had a
good last meeting together. It has been a good experience, and I am glad this
class requires it. Thank you Dr. Williams!
Michael, it’s wonderful to see how you’ve enjoyed your eight meetings with your conversational partner. I have had the chance to meet with Denily, who is a really good friend of Norelly, my conversational partner, and I agree with you that Denily’s English is advanced. She definitely has the ability to talk both freely and confidently on a wide variety of topics. I have taken the TOEFL as TCU required me to take it and I have no doubts that Denily will do well in the test and in her transition into an MBA program. It appears to me that you’ve gained a lot more appreciation for people speaking English as a second language through these meetings. Thank you for your blog posts.
ReplyDeleteIt's awesome to see how well your conversations have went this semester! Denily being able to speak fairly fluent English is definitely an advantage! My conversation partner, Khalifa, has vastly improved his English since we started talking in September but he still struggles to put some ideas into words which sometimes makes it difficult to make our opinions know. And it wasn't just him, there were many times when I struggled to phrase things in a way that he would understand. Khalifa is also switching schools and it was crazy how many hoops he had to jump through! Regrettably, I'm sure Denily will be forced to do the same thing. Thanks for the posts!
ReplyDeleteI literally laughed out loud reading this. I think Black friday is so unusual! My brother and I went there once in Ohio. Not to shop, but just to get one pice of food. WE were starving at about 1am while we were visiting our grandparents and NOTHING was open. It was thanksgiving night so clearly nothing would be in a podunk town of Ohio. WE went into this walmart we found and we received the oddest looks from people as they rushed around to get their cheap goods. My brother and I got a burrito and a ham and cheese sub. Quite the assortment of savings. So from my experience and just knowing how a person from a different country could view this event as, I just couldnt help but laughing extremely hard!
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