Conversation #5

I met with my conversation partner for our fifth conversation meeting today. At our last meeting, my partner had informed me that she would no longer be attending the TCU English learning classes because she was just too busy. This set the tone for our last conversation, in which we discussed alternative ways she could go about learning English such as reading and TV. To follow up on what we had discussed last time, I asked my partner how her English progression has been going since leaving the TCU program.

                The first topic we discussed was how the media and TV were helping her learn English. Previously, I had suggested that she attempt to read a few books in English but, she hardly reads any books in Spanish, let alone English. Due to this, we agreed that watching more television in English would help her learn to listen better to English conversations. I asked her how much English TV she usually watches per day. She said that she mostly listens to the news in Spanish but, there are several TV shows that she likes to watch. She said that she likes to watch the shows “Revenge” and “The Jersey Shore” on TV. Naturally I asked her whether she thought watching “The Jersey Shore” was helping to improve her English. She told me, that while the show was entertaining, there were a lot of words she couldn’t understand, and weren’t defined in a dictionary. This came as no surprise to me as, I can’t even understand some of what the actors on that show say. I explained to her that the actors in “The Jersey Shore” speak a “dialect” of English which is not formal and, it might not help her learn English as well as watching some more wholesome types of shows might. While explaining this to her, she told me that Venezuelans feel that some of the countries surrounding the Gulf of Mexico speak a dialect of Spanish that is considered inferior in Spain and some south American countries.

                The notion that some dialects of Spanish were considered inferior to others seemed interesting to me. I imagine that it is similar to some of the views on types of accents in the United States. For example, most people view African American Vernacular (or Ebonics) as an inferior dialect of English. It even occurred to me many people in California, where I live, consider Texan and Southern accents inferior because of the slow speech and drawl, which they consider to be a sign of being less intelligence. I asked my conversation partner if any of the Spanish speakers in Texas ever tell her she has an accent. Apparently, she gets asked all the time, by people she doesn’t know, “where are you from?” because of her accent. She told me that many people think she is from Spain because she speaks in a much more formal tone than is generally spoken in Texas. She compared the difference between her Spanish and Texas Spanish as similar to the difference between English from England and American English.

                  I thought it was odd that she was able to tell the difference between different types of English accents, since I am unable to tell the difference between Spanish accents. I told her “I can’t distinguish between any Spanish accents. How are you able to distinguish between English ones?” Apparently, the only way she is able to distinguish between English accents is whether she is able to understand them or not. She told me she can’t understand people from Australia, Boston, or Minnesota so, she knows there must be heavy accents in those areas. I confirmed that those areas definitely had distinctive heavy accents. At this point, our conversation was drawing to an end but, she told me that for the next conversation she would bring her laptops so, she could show me a video compilation of all the different types of Spanish accents.