DJ CP#1

Today I met with Kwang. He is from South Korea and works for the Korean Department of Education! I feel like there's a lot of pressure on me to make sure he learns a lot! I gave him the diagnostic test, and he essentially got a 100%. Besides knowing all the vocab and perfectly completing the reading and dictating portion, he also provided multiple answers for the editing section. He said that he wanted to focus mainly on his speaking and listening. He told me to slow down at one point, and I found it so hard to do so. We want to get the whole idea out there, otherwise it feels like our minds are already on the next sentence when we ware still saying the first one. He told me that he wants to learn slang and proper English. I gave him a quick lesson about "gonna", "wanna" and "gotta" and explained to him that it is really okay to use these in spoken speech, but never in written. He asked if this would apply no matter who you are, and asked "Would Obama say gonna?". I told him that Obama would, and in fact probably has said "gonna" before, even when reading from a teleprompter. I then explained to him the word "like" and how we use it to mean "he/she said", as in "I asked my boss and they were like 'no way'". Then we talked for a good bit about cultural differences, in writing and speaking. Mainly we talked about politeness and being straight to the point. He said that in Korean, if you just ask someone a question flat out, and can be considered rude(like the Brazilian guy in the video). I told him that although we are direct a lot of times, we can also be seen as "fake" by other cultures. This is because we value politeness so much that sometimes we tell white lies in order to avoid awkward situations. At one point, he could not tell me something by speaking, so he wrote it down instead. I told him that next time I will bring something to dictate to practice his speaking, because he needs to work on pronunciation. As far as speaking goes, I'm not too sure how to practice this besides just talking, so I will refer to the book and ask Mrs. Kim how to practice this.