As an international student from China, culture shock is a real thing that I experienced/still experiencing. Everything people talked about in the video, I had the same feeling and experience at some point during the four years I am here. I actually never thought about why was I here. I knew I came to the States to study. People kept telling me that education is much better in the United States than what we have in China. So I never thought about going back since I was already here, but I did doubt whether I made the right decision to come.

                I had the issue of being afraid to speak. The orientation was stressful. I understand that orientation is for people to make friends, to get to know your peers and learn about the school, but forcing the international students (or maybe just me) to do it in just one week is simply too much. I come to be slow in making friends. It takes me time to get comfortable around others. During the whole week, I was literally scared. I was scared of the ice breaking games, I was scared of group discussions, I was even scared of self-introduction. One thing that I remember, I had been told that Americans don’t expect any real answer when they ask “how are you” or “what’s up”, so when I ran into a girl in my orientation group the second week of class, I didn’t respond to her when she asked me “what’s up”. Actually, I didn’t know what was the “correct answer”. She told me one day last year that she though I didn’t like her. The cultural differences, the misunderstandings, make things so difficult for international students.

I was not able to attend the regular 105 class because of time conflict, but watching the video Dr. Sharon posted on blackboard allows me to learn from other students in the class. I like all of the presentations. The use of pictures and videos in the presentation help people understand the subject. I really like the video “100 years of beauty”, it is interesting and grabs people’s attention, make you want to listen to the speaker and see what she has to say about it. Using data and graphs improve the credibility and reliability of the presentation content. Shuyi’s presentation contains lots of data, which make her presentation more interesting. Nobody wants to listen to a presentation that contains false information. The subjects are so diversified, listening to presentations allow people to learn the key point of each subject and further, learn about the culture. 

There are some key factors we should keep in mind when we learn Korean language. Most importantly, the sentence structure is very different. In English, we put verbs between subjects and objects while Korean always put the verb at the end of each sentence, which means they put “subject + verb” or “subject + object + verb”. As the result, we have to listen to the whole sentence to understand what the person is talking about.

                I learned English at school in China. We take two English classes every day, recite the texts, memorize vocabularies and listen to recorded tapes repeatedly. This way of learning helped me build a strong foundation of English learning. So at the beginning stage of my Korean learning, I am trying to do the same thing. There is no class for me, but I am still using a Korean language textbook that I bought online. As I mentioned in an earlier journal, grammar learning is really important to me. The textbook can help me with that.

                After I build the foundation, I plan to proceed to spend more time on listening. Watching Korean dramas is a very helpful way. I watched lots of American TV shows when I was in China. Although I did it out of my own interest, it is undeniable that the TV shows improved my listening ability much more than listening to the recorded teaching tapes. I think this way should work for Korean learning as well.

Korea, as an Asian country, has a very different culture from what we have in the United States (Western culture). Korean people use body languages so differently that we should pay attention to it to avoid misunderstandings. One particular thing that I notice in my research is that Koreans bow a lot. Traditionally, Chinese people bow to greet others, but the Chinese bow by putting hands together and gently nodding their heads. Koreans bow more “seriously”. They bent their body and look at the floor. The degree of the bent depends on who you are bowing to. Nowadays, they still bow to elders and people that they respect while neither Americans nor Chinese do it anymore.

                Most of the body languages are used and understood the same way in Asian countries. Grown up in China, I had always been told to avoid body touch and direct eye contact with others. Korean share the same culture with China in this aspect. Making direct eye contact is considered a challenge to others. In contrast, Americans like to shake hands and hug people as greeting and to show their kindness, and they take direct eye contact as a form of respect.

The three chapters from Crystal, D’s book remind me that languages are different in many ways. The same onomatopoeia may have different meanings in different languages. When learning a new language, we cannot just assume the native speakers can understand us just because we are imitating the sound. For example, we use “wang” in Chinese. Naturally I would expect people to understand me because I am simply imitating the sound, but in fact, people use “woof” in English. The two words and sounds are so different that no one would be able to guess they refer to the same sound. Another thing that I think important is the distinguishing between naturalist view and conventionalist view. I definitely agree with the latter one. During my study of a foreign language, I tend to focus on the sound, the listening and speaking part. It is not a problem if I am just trying to speak a language. But when I want to become a higher level learner in the target language, vocabulary becomes really important. My target language this time is Korean. As far as I know, Korean is not like English in the way that the spelling of the word is not so related with the sound. Simply focus on listening and speaking would make me an illiterate person to Korean people. That is definitely not my goal of learning, so I really have to keep in mind that I should spend more time on vocabularies during my study.

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