Sabrina - Conversation Partner Week 2 - Making Progress

Today I met with Shin-hye at Panchero's with two of her South Korean friends. We grabbed our lunches and sodas and found a nice spot on the deck outside. I think Shin-hye liked having her friends there for some moral support. One of them spoke English very well as she was brought up in New York after coming to the U.S. at only four years of age.

At first Shin-hye would turn to her to ask in Korean how to say this or that. I didn't want to seem like a hard ass, but I had to put a cease and desist on that one. "No cheating." I said. I still think she is having some trouble with her feeling over her braces. She still covers her mouth and does not open it widely. I mentioned that she had a very soft spoken voice and that I had a hard time hearing her. She needed more volume.

I had asked her to bring a photo of her family so we could talk about that. She opened her lap top to pull up the file and BAM! HK was all up in the place (that's Hello Kitty for the uninitiated). Her laptop had pink Hello Kitty stickers on each key that carried the Korean character an d the corresponding English letter. I expressed my deep jealousy at her HK wealth and we had tiny break through expressing our love of Sanrio and her highness HK.

Shi-hye's greatest challenge is her inability to speak in complete sentences. She said to me during this meeting, as with the last, "I want English very much." I wrote down on her notepad exactly what she had said. I told her, "I understand what you meant, but this is not a complete sentence." I told her there was a missing verb. A very important missing verb that would complete the sentence so that anyone would understand. I asked her what she wanted to do with English and made the hand gesture that one usually uses for a blabber mouth. She instantly got it and we fixed the sentence to "I want TO SPEAK English very much." I know "very Much" sounds a bit strange but I can't see Shin-hye understanding just yet something like "really badly" or "I really want to..."

After she told me some things about her family I told her somethings about me. I told her and wrote down, where I went to undergradute school and what I studied. I shared that I had moved to NYC after and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology for Fashion Design. Shin-hye got very excited about this and said "I like fashion too!" This lead to much more relaxed speaking on her part about her love of clothing and window display design. I asked her next time to bring me a drawing of a fashion idea she had and that she could explain it to me. She seemed embarrassed that her drawing skills may not be up to par.

I asked if she sewed and she said she did not. I told her that if she wanted to learn to sew, I would be happy to teach her and that it would be a good way to practice English and to learn to talk more about something she enjoyed.