Our names are Tomoko, Emi, Masao, and Yuki. 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 go abroad and talk with people from many different countries. 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 music. We chose this topic because we love music and wanted to know the difference between Japan and the US.
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 Eminem is not his type of music!
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 karaoke is not so popular in the US. (It is hugely popular here in Japan.)
Since we are studying English now, we could also learn some new vocabulary from our partner. Some new words or expressions we learned are stuff, which means material or different things; mellow, which means calm or relaxing (music); and offend, which means to upset someone.
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 @ 6:17 AM
