Andrew CP #3

Date/Time: 06/11/21 9:00 a.m.

Location: Conversation over Line

Topic discussed: Comparing office culture, his girlfriend's desire to practice English, my future job opportunities, television series' 

Cultural and/or linguistic topics you and your partner learned: Yanzhou and I talked for quite a while. We started by talking about his manager and then Taiwanese office culture in general. He told me about a number of problems he has had with his manager and how he feels it stems from a poor work place culture that has developed in Taiwan. We compared it to other places like The U.S., Korea, and Japan and discussed how they have all influenced each other over time. Fortunately, he will be moving to a new job soon so hopefully his managerial woes will soon come to an end. From there we discussed where I may start looking for jobs after I graduate. I have always held Taiwan towards the top of my list since I am familiar with the culture, language, and job market. However, Yanzhou has always recommended that I look elsewhere for work first. His reasoning being that, while he understands that I like Taiwan a lot I should also be open to exploring new cultures and gaining more experiences in other countries. I perfectly understood his sentiment, but then took time to further explain my perspective on the subject. Since I will most likely being working on contract anyway, my plan has been to spend a bit of time in each country in which I feel I could appropriately apply my skills. Most likely Taiwan, and then maybe Korea or Singapore, and then China or Japan. I decided on this order mostly because of how well I believe I would be able to teach in that environment, the pay, the level of teaching experience I could gain by teaching there, and how much teaching experience I will need when I start teaching. After that, Yanzhou told me about his girlfriend's desire to improve her English ability. While she won't have the time to dedicate to study like Yanzhou does and talk for about 2 hours a week, she is still going to start sending me writing and speaking samples so I can provide her with basic feedback. I was very excited to hear this. While it may give me slightly more work for no real benefit other than a bit more practice at making corrections, I was very happy to hear that the progress Yanzhou had made in his English ability had inspired his girlfriend to start practicing as well. Finally, since Yanzhou is fairly advanced in his English language learning he frequently practices his listening by consuming native speaker content. This time he told me about how he had just finished watching Breaking Bad for the first time. Which I comically learned is named 冰毒 in Mandarin which literally translates to "Ice poison" in reference to the methamphetamine.