Chris H. CP 1

My conversation partner is Marcel van Veen. He is an exchange student from Arnhem, Holland and has only been in the United States for two months prior to my introduction to him. His English speaking abilities are limited, as he studied specifically French and German in his high school, yet in the short time he has been in Tallahassee he has picked up enough to have short, choppy sentences of exchange. His intention is to improve his English here until the end of the summer, while taking classes at TCC, in order to travel to Germany and have a better chance at being accepted into an accredited university in Berlin. I met him through a mutual friend in the German club of FSU who was hosting a tour of facilities on campus, and we ate lunch at Chilis and got to know each other. He remarked on the accent of our waitress, who had a slight southern drawl, which I used as a conduit to a conversation on dialects in this country and the many different ways that people speak English. We humorously practiced some expressions of the south, such as y’all and ain’t, dividing the words and showing their relation to proper English in a condensed form. Likewise, I verified what chicken fried steak was, and attempted to explain the importance of sweet tea as a cultural phenomenon to the southern region of the United States. He remarked that ice was a rare request in Holland to be put in drinks, but that he was coming to see the logic of it due to the already rising temperatures in Spring Tallahassee. After our short lunch, we planned to meet again the following weekend.