Stephanie CP# 5

Today I met up again with my conversation partner Ghunaim! I had planned for us to do the “describing your country and culture” conversation partner activity, which turned out to be a lot of fun. I have to alter my speech a little bit for Ghunaim to understand me, but we were still able to have very fulfilling conversation. While he didn’t understand some lower frequency words in this activity like “majority” and “minority,” he was more than willing to learn them. He had a little notebook where he wrote new words he learned which I thought was a great idea. Throughout the conversation I kept using “majority” and “minority” in natural ways to help him remember it. I asked if the majority of people supported Musallam Al-Barrak (someone who he said was an important person in Kuwait), and if the majority of people in Kuwait smoke. He was able to catch onto these words really easily and produce them naturally. When expressing his ideas about his country he had some issues producing words like “war,” “invade,” “enemies,” “oppression,” “freedom” etc, but he wrote all of them down after I suggested them and explained them. It was a lot of fun talking about our country’s holidays, and he was very interested in the fact that I am Jewish. He even had me write a list of important Jewish holidays for him. He knew quite a bit about the culture of Christmas from movies, but didn’t know much about Judaism at all and made it clear he wanted to learn more. I was very happy with how open minded he was to the fact that I was a minority in this sense.