He moved to the United States in July of 2011 and is now learning English formally for the first time. He told me how he used movies and TV shows to learn as much english as he could before he moved over to America. We started by talking about his family and siblings, he lives in the same house as his parents and his grandparents (something quite common in Saudi culture) and is the middle child of the 10 children. He spoke about how growing up with such a big family is quite common in Saudi Arabia and it is simply apart of the culture there.
Mansour is the only member of his family to travel to the United States and the only one formally learning english. I quickly inquired what his purpose for learning english was and he answered that finding a job in Saudi Arabia is nearly impossible now without a college degree and fluent english. I was quite amazed, thinking that a country with Arabic as the national language would have nearly all jobs requiring knowledge of the english language. He said that not even five years ago you could easily find a job only being able to speak arabic.
Mansour's ultimate goal is to learn english and then move on to getting a college degree in business (specifically human resources) from a college in San Antonio, Texas. He told me though that learning english outside the classroom here is hard because the only interaction he has with the language and native speakers is at restaurants. I am glad that I will be able to help him in this respect by giving him someone to speak to in english.
Here are just a few interesting facts I learned about Mansour:
- He loves to play Fifa on the Playstation 3
- He bought a copy of Call Of Duty for many of his brothers (you can't get this is Saudi Arabia)
- He thought Texans would ride horses around like the wild west
- He loves watching movies
- He loves watching soccer
No comments:
Post a Comment