Our names are Ami, Aki, Naruki, and Yuji. We are students at Kwansei Gakuin University, which is located in Nishinomiya, Japan, between Osaka and Kobe. We are now taking a course in Intermediate English in the Intensive English Program. We study English because we want to know about different cultures and talk with different native English speakers. For this class, we had to choose a topic about something we wanted to know more about American culture or American student life. We then had to interview an American student about this topic and compare our image with their answers. Our partner was Chuck, who is a conservation biology major at SUNY-Oswego. The topic we chose was crime. We chose this topic because we wanted to know whether crimes which occur in the US are different from in Japan. The answers we got from our partner changed our image about the US just a little. On a scale from 1 to 5, if 1 means it didn’t change our image at all and 5 means it changed our image of the US on this topic, we would say the number 1. The most surprising answer we got from our partner was that simply owning a lot of guns does not equal a lot of crime.
By exchanging email with an American student, we could also learn some new things about North American society. The most interesting piece of information we got from our partner was that although Canadians own many guns, they have one of the lowest murder rates in the world.
Since we are studying English now, we could also learn some new vocabulary from our partner. Some new words or expressions we learned are homicide, which means murder; larceny, which means different kinds of theft; and mug, which means to attack someone to get their belongings.
We would like to thank our partner for taking the time to help us with this assignment. We also hope they can visit Japan someday and learn more about Japanese culture.
# posted by Johninjapan @ 6:08 AM
