Our names are Chikako, Mami, Maya, and Kanako. 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 communicate with people from all over the world. 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 Dennis, who is a double major at in English literary studies and adolescence education English at SUNY-Oswego. The topic we chose was lifestyle of American students. We chose this topic because we wanted to know the difference in lifestyles between American and Japanese students.
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 American university students seem to study even harder than Japanese students.
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 sending e-mail by cell phone is not so popular in the US now. (As it is quite popular in Japan now.)
Since we are studying English now, we could also learn some new vocabulary from our partner. Some new words or expressions we learned are adolescence, which means the age of junior high school and high school students; cool, which means interesting or great; and texting, which means sending short messages by cell phone.
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 @ 6:36 AM
