A much smaller scale example of this is when I studied for a semester in France. I thought my French was decent but it turned out to be barely comprehensible by native French-speakers which doesn’t make for easy or fun friendships.
One thing I've heard is that the Finns consider many of the exchange students to be a bit juvenile since in their home countries people often live with parents until their 30s. Whereas most Finnish students move out and become fully independent by age 20.
Kiwi here, a lot of us move out and go flatting at the first possible chance we get - which is right after high school/first year of uni.
Given the difficulty of affording a deposit for new home buyers who have been renting since 18 (like me - Aussie here), I can see the logic in it.
I would go so far to say that the only time this is not the norm is when children move to a big city to work, leaving their parents back in their smaller hometowns. Then they live as cheaply as possible in dorms that exist for this purpose. There's a whole infrastructure.
In the Philippines I found that depending where you were from, depended on whether you left home as early as possible for better opportunities.
Never heard of the dorms thing though.
My wife and I will buy a house one day, but it won't be near any of the "big" NZ cities. Too expensive.
I see the logic too, but surely your mental health must suffer!
The south of Europe. Spain is probably the most outstanding country in this regard.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-millennials-are-living-at-...
The Netherlands is interesting. It's nearly guaranteed that their English is better than your Dutch, so if you try anything more than "good morning" then they will generally rapidly switch to English. More politely than in France, but with a firmness that indicates no desire at all to waste time on communication problems when none are necessary.
I do wonder if this is a cultural difference as another fellow commenter mentioned - maybe I was corrected and did not take it as an insult (and don’t even recall it), because I am not originally English or American.
Anyway, my point was that you were propagating a negative stereotype, and not based on your own experience even. The world has enough negativity already... It’s not nice.
As a native French speaker, this strikes me as odd, since it is typically a foreign thing to consider French as the epitome of spoken languages, that makes most French people I know scratch their heads uncomfortably. I interact with foreigners everyday, most of the time in English. Most of them are PhD students that spend at least three years in France, and usually acquire some French along the way, to varying degrees of proficiency (from greetings to highly technical/rhetorical conversations)
I know some of them that handle it well enough for basic conversations, and I will usually go along with them until it becomes difficult for either party to understand the other.
Actually, I might be a bit too eager to switch back to English as I have a stereotypical view of their possible interactions with other French people, who might not "excel" at English. Usually, I will not correct them on a word unless it was the root cause for a misunderstanding, or they asked me to tell them when they do a mistake. I am also happy to discuss grammar and etymology topics, as I am usually curious about other languages as well. I do not want to keep them from learning French, nor force them to speak it, so I'll play along what I guessed their intentions were, based on our previous interactions.
On the other hand, we are taught French at school with very rigid rules, which are tweaked from time to time (by the "Académie Française"). This helps with uniformization, but could be argued either way. And finally, it might be a bit elitist of me, but a lot of French people struggle with proper writing (French is much harder to write than it is to read or speak), which I think looks very unprofessional and neglected. Quite a lot of people will frown on this (at least those that make fewer mistakes), though foreigners usually get a free pass (from myself at least, not quite sure about others).
I hope that clears things up a bit. I find it a very interesting topic, as are the issues of social integration and forming small cliques.
I'm French. When I mispronounce something people will correct me. That's how we learn and it is expected.
Now when I voicechat with American people and say something they don't understand I just get some "polite" silence.
So I think it is a case of people taking offense because of a culture difference. "They're white, using the same characters as us so they're the same", nope.
No one hates the Parisians like the people from Marseille or Lyon.
Even within Chinese in China, people from the same region tend to hangout much more due to language and culture differences. I grew up speaking both mandarin and cantonese natively so i made friends with both sides and saw the same pattern.
I would say this is just human nature. It is amplified for Chinese students in the west because there are more of them ;)
Believe me, they really want to hangout with native students as well, but it’s not easy. It’s like you know going to gym is good for you, but because it requires extra hard work every day, you ended up skipping it.
> the other 200 odd people in the hall
For anyone unfamiliar with this somewhat uncommon usage, Matt is not saying that these are odd accommodation halls or odd people (strange or unusual).
The "odd" here means that the preceding number is approximate - there are about 200 people in this hall, and about 20 halls in total.
It's usually written with a hyphen to make this more clear:
"the 20-odd accommodation halls" or "the other 200-odd people in the hall."
Edit: I can't even ask for a reference without getting downvoted again and again. Nice.
In terms of liberalization, Saudis who studied abroad are the leaders of the liberal movements within the country. They don't transform into liberal Americans, but they do shift into liberal Saudis. Liberal Saudis are still on average more conservative than their American classmates, but back home they create the shift we are seeing today in a progressive direction.
Both effects are intended by the government. The social mobility aspect is part of the Saudi welfare state, and it adds great economic value through knowledge transfer. The liberalization is part of a long campaign to loosen the grip of religious leaders on the community and consolidate power.
Source: I went to university abroad on the King Abdullah scholarship program.
There are plenty of Chinese people here in Toronto who have been here for two plus decades and still have very poor English (or feign as much). Because they live in Chinese communities, shop at Chinese grocery stores, and eat at Chinese restaurants.
It's their kids who learn English or the ones entering a work environment where English is used.
Short travel is a mind opener. But living abroad dye your soul forever.
So not only is elitism bad for other countries, it is seriously bad for the US as well!
Not sure why OP got downvoted.
it is to the US-centric benefit that I should mention it, or expend the energy to explain myself, not the other way around
If they are the one complaining about something yes it is their job to educate from basic communication alone. No matter how frustrating it may be forcing others into playing a game of Mao is not reasonable.
Firstly it maintains an elite who are much better educated, and skilled, than those at home.
Secondly, when there's lots of foreign students from the same place, they just clique up. In my university there were a lot of Chinese students that hung around almost exclusively with other Chinese students.
One year I represented the student common room, a sort of social club/support network for everyone living in one of the 20 odd accommodation halls.
Despite trying, the 50-100 Chinese in our hall never mixed, keeping themselves extremely secluded from the rest of us. I remember chatting regularly with one person.
To put that in context, I knew the name and would at least exchange greetings with virtually every one of the other 200 odd people in the hall.
There were a lot of other foreign students because it was a self catering hall. They were better, though still ultimately formed their own, mixed nationality, foreign students clique within a few weeks. It was more accessible though as the shared language was English.