Our names are Misa, Kaori, Daisuke, and Nonge. 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 English is spoken around the world now and we want to travel abroad and speak with people from other 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 Greg Uyeno, who is high school senior in California. The topic we chose was trends. We chose this topic because we are very interested in American trends and want to know the differences between trends in the US and trends in Japan.
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 the hairstyle he showed us that is a current trend in the US, because in Japan bleached hair is ordinary and not really a current trend.
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 about Cinco de Mayo, so we know about that more in detail 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 “Cal,” which is short for the University of California; host, which means the person who introduces and runs a TV show; and horoscope, which means someone’s fortune as told by the stars.
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 @ 6:28 AM
