Word Choice: Third Meeting

            Ibrahim and I had quite a bit of difficulty meeting up for a few weeks. He had gotten sick and, with fall break in the middle of everything, it had been impossible to get together. Finally, we were able to meet for our third meeting again at the bookstore for coffee. When I found him, he got up and gave me a hug and we proceeded to get in line to buy coffee. I then asked him, “What have you been up to?” He gave me a bit of a blank stare and so, thinking he hadn’t heard me, I repeated my question saying, “What have you been doing lately?” After the second time I asked, he gladly told me that he was planning a trip to Florida with his sister to take some time in the near future and that he had gone to Austin the last weekend. Ibrahim told me that he was required to go take English tests in different locations to test his proficiency in the language and the last one had been in Austin. He then expressed to me how, although he could understand many words when they were spoken in conversation, he had a hard time reading them off a paper because English words are often spelled differently than they sound.

            Once we had gotten to talk for a bit, Ibrahim asked me if I could help him learn some of the words that were in a book he had bought for himself to learn some conversational English. Up until this point I had had very little difficulty expressing or understanding anything in our conversations so it was interesting to see what kinds of things he had trouble with in learning. The first thing he asked me, before we even started looking at the book he had brought, was what I had meant when I had asked him “What have you been up to?” earlier in our conversation. I realized then that he had heard my original question but just didn’t know how to respond. I quickly explained to him that I had been asking what he had been doing recently. Our miscommunication had occurred when I used the words “up to.” I found out that he hadn’t been able to distinguish between the sentences “What are you up to” and “What have you been up to?” He was confused by my meaning but when I asked the question in a different way, he had been able to understand exactly what I was trying to convey.

            One of the things that Ibrahim and I went over in our discussion was names for people. He didn’t understand most of the names we use for people in normal conversation in order to describe how they are. Just a few examples are “jerk,” “nerd,” and “sweetheart.” Words for people that are common in our everyday speech were completely foreign to him and it took me a few minutes to explain each one in simpler terms that were easier to understand. The hardest thing for me to relate to him was the concept of the word “awkward.” How do you explain “awkward” in simple terms? I could understand why he was having trouble grasping some words when even I couldn’t explain it easily. Giving Ibrahim a lesson in conversational English was as interesting for me as much as it was for him because I got to see the kinds of concepts that don’t relate as well across language barriers.