Cue Card
Describe an interesting conversation you had with a stranger
You should say:
– Where you met them
– What kind of person they were
– What you talked about
And explain why the conversation was interesting.
I meet a lot of strangers so I try to remember like a special meeting and I chose the time when I met a friend which he’s now a friend, he was not a friend of time called Gustavo. He’s from Korea and I met him in the language school in Canada where I used to work as a French teacher, and when I went to the school he was there and so the director she introduced me to him, Gustavo, and she told me that she was a student in the same university as me which I didn’t know at the time. So we talked about university and we also talked about language teaching because he was a teacher with a lot of experience and I was not. I was beginner as a French teacher and he was already an experienced teacher, so we could talk a lot about that and also he told me about his personal story and actually I discovered that he had a studied in France for a few years before coming to Japan. Actually, I was very impressed because when he first talked to me I thought he was French. His French was really perfect with no accent and he used a lot of expressions of phrases that we use like commonly in French, even some like bad words, stuff like that. So I was very impressed when I met this guy and he started to learn Japanese and now he’s back in Colombia and he is a teacher of Spanish for foreign students and also he teaches English and French and probably Japanese, so he’s very interesting person so that’s the meeting I chose.
Follow Ups:
1. What age group do you think has the best communication skills?
– Younger people tend to talk a lot maybe. They tend to talk maybe to they can’t talk to anyone, so I don’t know if it’s the definition of a good communication skill but yeah I would say maybe youngsters especially when they go to some parties and then they can talk to almost anyone, when you get older maybe that’s the kind of thing you hesitate to talk maybe to strangers or two people you don’t know, so maybe that kind of the age factor is quite important maybe for communication skills.
2. In your opinion, has technology improved the way we communicate?
– That’s interesting, a few years ago I would have said probably no because I was a bit annoyed at seeing young people always on their phones like I don’t know what they’re doing because I didn’t have smartphone at the time, but then when I thought about it and I discussed about it with a lot of different persons, I noticed that many people, young people use smartphone not to play games or to watch stuff but to communicate actually so they don’t communicate the same way as I used to do because like for instance, when I came back from university with my friend in the subway liked we talked all the way along right for one hour, but now when I see two friends sitting in the subway they are sometimes they talk and then using phone but actually they’re probably talking to someone else on the phone so it’s a different way of communicating, so I would say technology has really improved the way we can communicate to each other.
3. Do you think we have lost any communication skills because of technology?
– Maybe to write letters, to write formal texts maybe, that’s something maybe that is getting lost probably. Also as I said talking to someone for a long time like for one hour in the subway, maybe because of the smartphone now people don’t use it, don’t do that anymore. So maybe that’s the kind of the depth of conversation is a bit different now. But I’m not young anymore so I wouldn’t say fair enough.
4. Do you think it is still important for children to learn handwriting? Why?/Why not?
– Yes, definitely. It’s important because I don’t think that technology can replace everything I don’t know but for instance if you need to write a memo at home you won’t use your smartphone to do that and even handwriting is also important not only to some tool, or it just to write it’s also a tool to learn. By learning of handwriting, you can get many different processes inside your head. It’s also something that has to do with the coordination between the brain and the arm so I think it’s very important to learn that.
5. How do you think people will communicate in 20 years?
– When I was 20 years younger I wouldn’t have imagined that we could now communicate with using smartphones and even like watches like that, so I don’t know but I’m not sure the way we communicate can, that’s strange to say that but can evolve that much. It’s always the same like you communicate with someone with words or you have the emojis now so it’s a bit different use pictures to communicate that can evolve maybe. Maybe with videos like you will send video messages directly to your friends which is already possible so I don’t know if it’s going to become the norm in 20 years. I don’t know that’s an interesting question I’ve never thought about it but I hope we will still be able to communicate with words.