My first TalkAbroad experience was very stressful. I found myself trying to prepare meticulously, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had no idea how the format worked, I didn’t know what the people would be like, and I wasn’t sure how accomodating they would be. In the 30 minutes before my session, I was panicking the entire time. Once I got in I understood the pacing better. My partner would enunciate slowly, and make sure I didn’t miss any words. The biggest issue I had during this session would be a lack of things to talk about. I looked over the list for devoir #1, but I didn’t have all the information on it memorized. At the very least, I didn’t have it panic memorized. I spent long stretches of time not knowing what to say to fill the silence. I eventually found some common ground in a book\/movie we both shared and managed to stretch out some time where we talked about characters and houses and theme parks. That part was fun, but overall I think this one stressed me out a ton. I did appreciate my partner’s patience, but it seemed at times she wasn’t really all there. If I could redo my first TalkAbroad I would have prepared more topics and maybe written stuff down for me to reference. I also did mine relatively late, so I wasn’t super familiar with the old material we went over. I failed to introduce myself properly and lacked some manners within the social convention. I’m sure if you go back into the audio recording you can hear me switch between Vous and tu interchangeably. I think it was a good experience for me, and a learned a bunch from it, but I don’t think I could say I had a positive experience that I enjoyed. I also wish I explained the devoir sheet that she could’ve looked over so that I could be assisted in some areas I didn’t really understand. Doing this again, I think I could do a lot better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My first TalkAbroad experience was very stressful. I found myself trying to prepare meticulously, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had no idea how the format worked, I didn’t know what the people would be like,… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23309,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wp.odu.edu\/anthonylutz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wp.odu.edu\/anthonylutz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wp.odu.edu\/anthonylutz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wp.odu.edu\/anthonylutz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23309"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wp.odu.edu\/anthonylutz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wp.odu.edu\/anthonylutz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":639,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wp.odu.edu\/anthonylutz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/547\/revisions\/639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wp.odu.edu\/anthonylutz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}