Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Social Mixer for US/China



Mike's note: in the picture you can see Amy and Esther, who are mentioned in Sarah's post. This post is one sent to me tonight for the blog by Nadira. Enjoy!


from Nadira:

Meeting the Chinese students was a funny and a very nice experience. My group did a good job working with the Chinese students. We both did a good job helping each other.

Hearing them speak their language was nice although I have Chinese friend who sometimes used to teach me one or two Chinese words, but it was nicer to hear them speak it, especially when they are reading the poems. They were reading with their hearts. I never saw anyone other then poetry teachers read poems like that.

I was amazed when Sue said her mother taught her one of the poems and that she knew from the heart since she was a child, like all Chinese children. Challenges we face while talking about the poems was that for the Chinese students it was so easy for them to translate the poems to us, while we had problems translating the American poems to them. They explained to us every word in the poems and how to say to what it means and it was kind of sad that we weren’t able to do the same for them.
Maybe the next time we will try hard. They were just amazing!

One thing that I learn from these students was that they have a hunger for the English language. They want to know everything in the poems. They were very serious about it and they try to repeat what they learn. Chinese students are serious about education! It was an amazing experience. I always thought the Chinese language was very hard to learn but after listening to them it seemed nice and easy (I may try it sometime). I love how they write, too.

Thank you all for the amazing experience and have fun here!!!

Nadira Ibrahim

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