9.19.07

Category: dribblings

today i met my new Conversation Partner. i can’t remember if i’ve blogged about the CP program before so lemme ‘splain real quicklike what that is. the local jr. college (are they still called jr. colleges?) has an international student program and there are loads of foreign students. so the Conversation Partner program is a deal where people from the community volunteer to talk to a student for an hour a week so’s they can practice their english. it’s really awesome. this is my fourth or fifth semester to do it. it’s really hard for me to do it during the summer months, but during the regular semester it’s somehow easier.


this time my CP is a cool russian chick named alice. her english is better than the other CPs i’ve had, but i’m not sure if it’s just that it’s easier to understand her accent, see, the last two years i’ve had mostly asian students and lemme tell ya, sometimes their accent was quite a challenge. hee, there were times when i would ask the students to repeat something 4 times, then it was, “can you spell that? ….heh, no….not out loud…on paper.”


anyway, alice is learning many different languages so she can go back to her country and be a translator for some kind of international company. doesn’t that sound like a cool and interesting job? you’d get to meet so many people! and you’d be crazy important to the company!


wish i had thought of that 10 years ago.


speaking of translators, here’s a clip from the Catherine Tate Show (i love this show so hard) it’s her character “helen” who is notorious for trying to be helpful but not knowing how to do the things she always says she can do.


 


i love catherine tate. she’s amazing at accents and characters. another of her characters is this couple where the lady comes home and tells her husband about the “crazy” things that happened to her that day. they’re always normal things but they act like they’re the most hilarious things ever. here’s my favorite:


 


and this stand alone sketch kills me:


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