In the video the example was given of international students banding together and making friends with one another more easily than they can with American students. Something that I unfortunately hear often on campus from American students is that they think international students think that they are "better than" American students because they don't associate with them as much as they seem to with other internationals, or that they don't want to be friends with American students. They address this very well in the video and note that international students would really like to interact more with American students, and vice versa, but that cultural divide is far too significant, and the culture shock far too intense, for the two parties to truly become close to one another.
Another important aspect of the culture shock is the educational aspect. School is the reason why the international students come to the University, and unless they went to a United World College, each nation has its own educational guidelines and expectations that are very different from one another. In the video, some of the students talk about their experiences with these differences, particularly in class. The instance of the Asian student who was uncomfortable with speaking in class, but whose grade relied on her in-class participation, struck me while I was watching the video. She was never asked in her home country to speak out in class about her opinions or the subject matter because the way that her classes were structured were different in that respect; it is mostly lecture-based, if I remember correctly. Yet she forced herself to adapt, despite how uncomfortable she felt and how hard it was for her. I think that a lot of domestic students do not understand the significance of this difference in culture that international students feel every day, because for some students from particular cultures, every interaction they have with American people is different from what they would have done had they been at home. This immense pressure and culture shock must be incredibly overwhelming for them.
All in all, the culture shock video was not only informative but also helped me to relate to the international students a lot more. I can understand a lot of the frustrations that they hold when coming into a different culture, whereas before I knew I thought that I could simply never understand. I feel as though understanding the differences between culture definitely helps you to learn a language, as we have covered before in previous discussions. Understanding the way that the culture works is a large part of being able to utilize your acquired language skills, as you must understand non-verbal cues as well as colloquial phrases, something with which many of the international students in the video seemed to have trouble. The video shows me that above all, even if I wanted to try to go test my language skills in Turkey right now, I would still be lost; I could ask for directions and food, but even international students who have been studying English for years still become overwhelmed every now and then.
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