A Chat With Hissa

Going into Tuesday, I didn’t really know what to expect. In high school I was part of a conversation program similar to this, but on the other side of the table as I was the Spanish student talking to fluent speakers. I was a tad nervous to see how this would play out.

Right from the beginning, we were having issues communicating on the phone. Hissa thought I said to meet at 2:50 (instead of 2:15), and I thought she said we would meet at the bookstore (when she meant Union Grounds).  Immediately I knew this was going to be a challenging affair, talking to a woman that knows very little English. After scrambling around campus for a while we finally met up.

Hissa is 27 years old and from Dammam, Saudi Arabia, about five hours from the capital Riyadh. She has never lived anywhere besides Saudi Arabia, but decided to come to America with her sister and brother (they are triplets!) for four years to study English. When her studies are done, she wants to move back to Saudi Arabia and be an English teacher.

One of the interesting points she brought up is the American stereotype of the Middle East. She wanted to make it very clear to me that Saudia Arabia, and the rest of the Arabic Peninsula for that matter, is not just sand, desert, and oil like us American’s tend to think it is. As she put it, there is a desert between Los Angeles and Dallas, just like there is a desert between Riyadh and Dammam. The big cities are no different than the urban areas we have in the United States.

To my surprise, talking to her was much easier than I had anticipated after our difficult phone call. Even though it is apparent she is still in the infant stages of learning the language, she was able to communicate one way or another, and was willing to take the time to figure out another way to say something with the basic language she knew. I really liked how open to critiquing she was, always willing to be corrected to learn something the right way. The toughest thing for her (and I can imagine it’s the same for any English learner) was the idioms and slang. For example, I once used the phrase “in the doghouse”, but she was unable to grasp that I meant “in trouble”, not literally in a doghouse. Also, she didn’t know the word “parents” stood for “mother and father”. Things like that one can only learn by speaking the language for a long period of time, and I’m not surprised she didn’t understand them.

All in all, it was a good first meeting with Hissa. I hope my future conversations with her go just as well.