Thursday, July 2, 2009

A smooth pickup, or a geniune desire to learn?

I was on my way to school today taking the 480 bus. As usual, I fell asleep midway through, but, this time, i was woken up by a Spanish fellow, or so he says. "Excuse me, excuse me. Hi, may I practice speaking English with you" he says in a mild tone to the girl sitting behind me. The girl is obviously a little creeped out by him as she says "sure", in a nervous and scared kind of tone. Throughout their whole conversation, I was just thinking, was he trying to get a date for Friday night? Or did he simply want to improve his oral English. Why would I think that you might ask. Well, plain and simple, his English sounded almost perfect with a tad bit of an accent. Some of my friends don't even sound as smooth as he does. Not only that, the girl also noticed it too and she was mentioning how he spoke as if he knows the language inside out. He then explained that he learned it throughout highschool i believe. I was actually still half asleep so i didn't catch the whole conversation, but, may I mention that it was a long one. Anyway, he was saying that his first language was Spanish and that he has learnt english throughout highschool and his undergrad. He just never got the chance to practice it becuase he would always speak Spanish to his friends and family. At this point, it reminded me of something Dr. Mariam Adeney said that was quite funny. I remember during the Koinos class that she taught about missions, she explained that there was this method of learning a lanuage that was developed by missionaries and she gave us an example. So on the first day, she would go to the learning center and learn some basic vocab and phrases and in the afternoon, she would walk around town talking to people. "Hi, my name is _____ and i come from ____. This is all i can say, have a good day." She would go from store to store to say the same thing and hopefully try and learn names. And everyday, she would do the same thing over and over again, learning more and more words and phrases. I thought it was the funniest thing. Imagine if you were a baker and everyday the same woman comes in and says the exact same thing to you, how would you react/feel?

Anywayssssssss, I'm just wasting time here because I got to school at 3 and was planning to see an academic advisor just to talk about courses and what not. However, when i got there, the receptionist told me they weren't taking drop-ins any more, so here I am, trying to waste time. Lalalalala goodbye.

3 comments:

  1. HHAHAH!!! wow that was pretty epic! the girl must of been pretty freaked.

    ReplyDelete
  2. apparently, a bunch of people from my church went to that Koinos class too.. oh, and i finally saw your church a couple of weeks ago!

    anyways, about that language-learning thing.. i think they actually say more things every day.. because they learn new things every day right? and as they learn more and more, they're able to engage in more conversation and hopefully, learn more things that they wouldn't learn in the 'classroom'...

    tcGb,
    fish

    ReplyDelete
  3. oh, btw.. i forget that i have another account.. on blogger.. but i'm not going to use it anymore. =P

    ReplyDelete