CP # 4 Caitlin

Last week, Ayoko and I met for lunch at the Globe. I had mentioned the Krishna lunch when we had gone to Coffee hour and Ayoko wanted to try it. We met outside of Strozier and walked over to the Globe together. It’s easy for Ayoko and I to communicate and we chatted about a lot of things including our love for learning languages. She speaks Japanese, English and German and I speak English, Spanish and some German.  At one point, she brought out her word journal so she could use a phrase. We laughed about it and I told that it was fine for our conversation partner meetings since she wouldn’t be able to do that with just any friend. I thought it was really interesting that she writes some of her definitions for her English words in German because it’s quicker for her to translate between the two Germanic languages than back to Japanese.

 We had fun trying the different foods at the Krishna lunch and she loved the mango lemonade. We talked about all kinds of things, like our study abroad experiences, hers in Germany, mine in Panama, the differences between our university programs and the education systems in general, etc. I told her about the Japanese story that was told on the video and she thought it was strange so it made me wonder about the breadth of the observations from that video. I still speak a little slower with Ayoko, but not much and I’ve stopped monitoring the vocabulary that I use because I don’t have to anymore. Ayoko knows a lot of vocabulary and she picks up unfamiliar words with context clues easily. I’m going to be sad when she goes back to Japan at the end of the month.