Our names are Naoki, Hide, Saori, and Satoka. 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 Japanese people are generally poor at English, but we will need English skill in the future, so we study English. 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 Alex, who is a freshman at San Diego State University. The topic we chose was impressions of Japan. We chose this topic because we think that people in some foreign countries have a negative image of Japan, so we wanted to know what Americans think about Japanese people and Japanese behavior.
The answers we got from our partner changed our image about the US 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 2. The most surprising answer we got from our partner was that there are some people in the US who are not really concerned about the environmental problem.
By exchanging email with an American student, we could also learn some new things about American society. The most interesting piece of information we got from our partner was that he wasn’t aware of the Kyoto Protocol.
Since we are studying English now, we could also learn some new vocabulary from our partner. Some new words or expressions we learned are SUV, which means sports utility vehicle, and idiot, which means really stupid people.
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 @ 6:15 AM
