CECS 5300- Research Activity #4 (Week 8 - 9)

Research activity two: Try to have a ten minute conversation with two different people in which you DO NOT use the letter "n." Write a reflection about the experience.

This was a very interesting activity. I had all three states of these monkeys. I found myself couldn’t say no, wouldn’t like to hear questions with no answers, and closed my eyes to think deeply. I have selected two people to talk with them for this activity. I started with my wife, and she was happy because I was not able to say no. We stared by saying hello to each other and then she started asking me questions that she knows I certainly say no to all of them. She asked if I will let her use our saving account to buy a new louis vuitton bag, I got panic and said no with a big “N”. In the next time, she asked the same question, and I said do you like the replica, and here she said NO, and this was the end of our conversation. I didn’t complete the activity because I knew that our conversation was unhealthy, and it would lead to heart diseases.

The next person was my friend. He started by asking me about my major, and my future plans. He was funny because he invented new ways to say no. For example, he used “the opposite of yes” to say no.

This activity was very difficult. It made me think a lot before speaking. It took me a long time just to say few words. I found myself easy to fall into mistake when I extensively concentrate and think about words that do not contain the letter “n”. It was obvious that most of our mistakes occur with simple words, such as “another, person, wanna, gonna, mean, one, and the word and.”

We were very careful to avoid saying “No” and “Never”. However, I found that I said no for the first horrible question and then I was trying to avoid no. since the English language is not my mother language, I was thinking in parallel, first thing to avoid all words with the letter n, and to speak a correct English.

Interestingly, I used the same activity to speak in Arabic, and it was not difficult like in English. I don’t know if this is related to the large amount of Arabic vocabulary that I have or maybe something else.