Marina and I had our first meeting was at TAMK’s main campus. We took some time to get to know each other at first and then started the actual lesson.
We decided that a quick introduction to each other’s languages was a good place to start. Marina taught me about the Spanish writing system and pronunciation. We also covered numbers and discussed some features of Spanish. I taught Marina similar things about Finnish and answered a few questions that she had about a Finnish course she is taking this semester. I think we managed to give each other a decent foundation to learn Spanish and Finnish in the coming months.
Marina surprised me with how good her pronunciation got during the meeting while I absolutely butchered Spanish. In my defence the Finnish writing systems seems to be a bit more consistent and thus easier to grasp.
Getting to practice conversational English is one of the aspects of this course that I was looking forward to. It’s been a while since I have actually had a casual conversation in English instead of just writing reports and emails. Having to teach and learn in English had its challenges since neither of us speak it natively. It wasn’t anything that Google translate couldn’t fix but I’m hoping we get better at explaining things in a way that the other can understand.
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