Language Experiment

Part 1: 
My partner chose a subject that he knew I would want to talk about (making it harder for me not to talk!), which was movies. Although I was permitted to use anything but my voice it was still challenging to get my words, let alone sentences across to him. I had to not only think of a word that had an action that he would understand but how I would put that word in to action along with the rest of my sentence I was trying to communicate to him. The conversation lasted for 15 minutes, however, if I was able to use words it probably would have been no more then a 5-7 minute conversation that was just starting and had not gone too in depth yet. It was funny and entertaining in the beginning but soon got frustrating when simple actions were misunderstood, making us have to back track over a whole part of the conversation again and find which 'word' was not understood. I have done an activity similar to this but it was a partner and I back to back, I was giving him directions and he was drawing what I was saying (Opposite of this experiment) and it was fun at first but then got irritating when the person showed you their drawing and it was not even remotely close to what you had told them and when you thought you gave them the simplest directions! My partner also said it was frustrating and even before the 15 minutes were up he just told me to talk to him because he couldn't understand what action or hand motion meant what, which frustrated him immensely. However, we both thought that with at least once person being allowed to talk it was easier then if both of us had to just shrug and move around to talk to each other.

Part 2:
This was the hardest part of the experiment!! I am such an animated person when I talk; laughing, using my hands, and tons of facial movements and this was really hard to get the hang of. My partner would tell me I made a movement here and there and we would start over, which irritated me to no extent after awhile! I finally imagined that my whole body and head were in a brace and the only part of me that could move were my lips and this worked wonders! We decided to change the subject and talk about politics, which was easy. Things that we talked about that were academic, like politics, were easy to say without emotion or movement because it doesn't require emotion or movement to get that information across since it's just information. Once we realized that politics wasn't a challenged we changed to talking about animals, specifically cute adorable kittens...this was extremely hard to talk about with some type of facial movement at least! We realized that talking about something that had emotional feeling to it, even if it just had attachment to me, was not only awkward sounding but almost like I was talking about something completely different instead of the cute cuddly kittens around the world! My partner said this would only 'work' if you were trying to convey some simple information that had no emotional attachment to the words, phrase, or subject and I agree completely with him since I didn't feel the need to get all animated talking about facts and information. However, bringing emotion in to the picture, I had to constantly start over or hold myself back from smiling, frowning, or just making any type of face in particular.

This experiment was hard, thought provoking, and made me realize the actions I do when I talk and even don't talk to get a point across. As well, having a partner give you feedback on how it was from an outside perspective was also interesting because I thought it would just be hard for me and boring or laughable to him but we both ended up getting frustrated near the end of the experiment so we could finally talk with words and understand each other. There were several major misunderstandings that drastically changed the conversation and because I could not correct him right away on the spot, it would take several actions for him to realize what I was saying. As well, I realized how important, at least for me, it is to use changes in your tone, facial movements, and even hand movements to help get your point across or even make you sentence/conversation flow better.