Correspondance

I've been keeping up an email conversation with one of my former roommate's closest friends from back home. She's at a university near home (in China) and is working very hard at the moment to practice and develop her English skills so that she can do better in the many tests to come. My lovely roomie gave her my email (with my permission, of course) so that I could help her with her grammar and give her practice leading conversations.

It's been amazing to watch her improve, but what's been more amazing is how much I've learned from the conversations. The stereotypes that we both have about each other's cultures are constantly coming into question, particularly now that we're comfortable enough with each other to be able to ask blunt questions. We talk a bit about school, friends, family, traditions and celebrations, food, or whatever else either of us are inspired to talk about. I've started to really enjoy the emailing: it's far more successful than any pen-pal system I've had set up in the past, with the combination of her diligence in responding and my guilt at failing to do so.

When I first agreed to this whole improving-English-through-email-conversation thing, I was thinking that the most time-consuming or challenging part would be the first piece of what I do, which is going through her most recent email and typing in suggested corrections to spelling and grammar. But I've learned through time that it's actually the easiest part to go through and make those simple changes, particularly recently as her mistakes have become fewer and simpler to correct. I usually go through and make the corrections as soon as I get her email, then save the new version as a draft a few minutes later and wait to come back to it.

Why wait? Well, she's very good at asking unassuming, but thought-provoking questions. Sometimes they're relatively straightforward, like asking about one of the American stereotypes that she's been fed by her companions or professors. They're not the ones I usually expect, like us all being fat or loud or stupid. A good example would be that she heard that all American teachers are nice. Of course this isn't true; we have a ton of variety. But it's difficult to pick out the right examples and the right explanations to illustrate the truth without spamming her with useless anecdotes. In response to that email, which was not the first that asked whether "all American ____s are _____," I ended up launching into a description of how I really saw the United States as being best described as being filled with variety. It's not all mixed together, and certainly not a healthy medium, but variation is perhaps the most consistent trait of this culture, whether in our professors, our food, our families, our professions, our homes, or our dreams.

If anyone starts reading this, I would love to hear what people think about this by-no-means-original description of the US. Also, if anyone has suggestions as to things that I can ask her about (we're starting to get on the subject of painting, but we tend to have a few threads running at a time), I'd love to hear them.