Our names are Ogachi, Chi, Yuki, and Ai. 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’ll need English skills in the business world in the future and someday we would like to work abroad. 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 Deirdre, who is an elementary education major at SUNY-Oswego. The topic we chose was marriage. We chose this topic because marriage is such an important part of our life, so we are interested in it.
The answers we got from our partner changed our image about the US somewhat. 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 3. The most surprising answer we got from our partner was that if new couples can’t afford a new house right away, sometimes they move in with the woman’s family first.
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 step families in the US are so common.
Since we are studying English now, we could also learn some new vocabulary from our partner. Some new words or expressions we learned are siblings, which means brothers or sisters; guardian, which means someone who is legally responsible for their children; and wind up, which means to end up doing something.
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 @ 6:55 AM
