ESL Partner

I had my first meeting with my ESL partner, Weiyi tonight.  We are both very busy, so finding a time to meet was hard.  It was strange using only e-mail to communicate at first, because I am so used to talking on the phone or texting, but she has no phone so communication was a bit slower.  We planned a place to meet, and it felt strange waiting for someone whom I didn’t know, or know what she looked like.  Luckily she was already there, so when I walked up she asked if I was Anna and there were no awkward encounters of me asking random people if they were Weiyi.  We shook hands and went up to Market Square to grab some dinner, where we sat in the back to avoid all of the noise –though it failed profusely, since it is still first semester and not everyone has learned that you may not exit the back doors without treating the back room to a lovely earsplitting symphony of the fire alarm.

 She is a first year music major who studies violin, which she has been playing since she was about four years old.  She got to the United States from China only two months ago, and had only learned English out of books but never really spoken it before she got here, though she is really quite good at it.  We were talking about the language and I asked her what the hardest part about learning it was, to which she replied, “tenses.”  Differing between, “how are you?” and “how have you been?” and other things like, “I will be there,” and “if I were there.”  It’s completely understandable; I remember learning Spanish and having to learn all of the tenses, though I hear English is much more difficult of a language to learn.  (I’m glad I grew up speaking it!)  We had a relatively short conversation, since half of it was taken up by eating and we stayed for just under an hour.  It’s always interesting having dinner with someone for the first time, and is typically sprinkled with awkward pauses where eyes are diverted and forks begin to take action to fill the pause, but for the most part we were able to hold a discussion with pauses at a minimum.  I’m interested to get to know her better –she inspires me already with her discipline of practicing playing her violin every day (which I should be doing with my singing) but I suppose once I’m no longer sick I’ll have no excuse and crack down.  We plan on meeting again next week, which I hope happens but I’m not sure about, since judging by her expression she is concerned about being able to fit in time to meet with her already full schedule.  We’ll see!