Allison TP - 3

Today I met with XinWen for the second time for a tutoring session. Like last time, we agreed to get some food and tutor at the same time during her lunch hour. Today I took her to FSU student hotspot: Mr. Roboto's. (She ordered the samaurai chicken at my suggestion and enjoyed it. Of course with yum yum sauce!) I must preface today's lesson with our text message correspondence though as it is kind of funny. When I had asked her about meeting up today (and also tomorrow for the Lofty Pursuits venture with Joyce and Ted) she seems to not be so thrilled. She kept answering with responses such as "Uh...fine" and "Uh...ok." I wondered if I may have said something during our last encounter that might have upset her. It wasn't until she just replied this morning to another text with just "Uh." that I made the connection that she was simply misusing the word. When I picked her up from CIES, I brought up the issue with her. It turns out she meant "uh huh" (which she said ever so enthusiastically I might add). I explained her the difference between "uh" and "uh huh" with the former meaning uncertainty and the latter being an affirmation used mostly for speaking and not writing. She was embarrassed for only a moment before apologizing for the confusion.

Once we had that all cleared up, we were able to order our food. She was able to order without my help today which was quite an improvement from last week at Panera! As we sat down to eat, I had her bring out what she was currently working on in her grammar class which was the present perfect verb tense. We went over one of her worksheets together which had some errors which we corrected together. It was hard to explain the concept of this tense to her sometimes. I had an issue trying to explain why "ridden" has two d's instead of one like the infinitive to ride. This also was accompanied with questions of why the correct word form is ridden instead of rodden. I didn't quite know how to explain that either. I had to simply use the "Just because that's how it is" answer.. I'll have to review that tense and see if I can find a better explanation.

Other vocab words we learned today included read vs road, helicopter, and purse. I admit that I had to resort to using Mandarin again to get her to understand what a helicopter was. Thankfully, I took Ramin's advice of buying a picture dictionary (for Mandarin) so I was easily able to find it in the book and show XinWen. It was quite helpful so much so in fact that for our conversation partner meeting tomorrow, XinWen requested that I take her to go get the same book. It has over 6,000 words in English/Mandarin so I'm sure it will be just as useful to her as it is for me.