In last week's group, we were talking for a bit about American food and fudge was mentioned, which not everyone had tried before. This led to an issue for me: I had no idea how to describe fudge to someone who had never tried it. While I floundered with the idea of it usually being kind of like a soft, chocolate brick, one of the others in the group offered to explain it to one of the others-- in Chinese. It was actually very funny so I let him go ahead and give it a try before asking him how he might translate it to English, which he and the other Chinese speaking group members worked together to do.
It was a really interesting instance where rather specified knowledge hit a variety of linguistic roadblocks. I couldn't express the idea in English, the group member could do it in Chinese, but not all of us present could speak Chinese. Ultimately putting the American object in Chinese and then bringing it back to English helped get the idea across (it was compared to a rich chocolate mochi type concoction) which I felt was a really nice example of how important and useful having multiple linguistic and cultural backgrounds at play was for expressing the concept. They did what I couldn't do alone by bringing in a mediating language and comparing it to something that I wouldn't have made a connection to.
That was the first time anything but English had been brought in verbally, which is still how I'm planning on keeping things since the group's main point is to practice English, but I'm feeling even more open to letting the group draw from other language and cultural concepts to help them express themselves in English-- it's all related and I'm learning a lot from what they bring up. I'm doing my best to be culturally sensitive and to stay educated, but I'm sometimes learning more from them than what I can teach myself.
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