Jackie CP3

My conversation partners are hilarious. They know each other, so at Tea Time we all sat together, with some other Korean CIES students, and were a little too loud. I met Jia for the first time, my second conversation partner, who has been in Tallahassee for five months and will stay until December. It's funny, because she sounds extremely American; as if her parents were from Korea but she has lived here growing up. Maybe this is simply vocal quality/tone, but she was excited to hear that! Fatih, my first partner, is a lower level than Jia, but he generally understands the same things. It seemed like a pattern that she would pick up on something immediately, but he would need it repeated twice or three times, and maybe converted to a simpler form. I think that it is extremely interesting though, that concepts are still understood--perhaps it is vocabulary that is the culprit. But in this case, it is a 4 level jump! So, we had an extremely non-serious conversation that included a lot of witty retorts and jokes about each other. It's so interesting to see two foreign students interact and communicate with one another when they both are learning the only language they could actually communicate in. But then again, it's not surprising--we are all about the same age, and meeting foreigners brings you the realization that no, we are not all exactly alike, but we have a lot of the same emotional mindsets. Our cultures and pasts and futures are different, and even how we see the world in terms of language, speaking, writing, making, and even thinking could have seperate patterns--but we all like to laugh. We all like to poke fun at each other and be silly for the sake of being silly. Or maybe my partners are just really hyper like me. But, it is a nice realization once you come upon it that around the world, you could probably communicate and probably relate to someone else.