SDLAP 105 Learning Journal 5

The hardest part about culture shock for me was that I only ever experienced it "in the moment": I didn't really have warning that it was going to happen, and for the most part I had to quickly adapt to that particular aspect of the culture at that time. For example, in China, if I wanted to use the only bathroom nearest to my classroom, I had to use a squat toilet. If I wanted to go off campus and get food at a nearby food street, I had to cross six lanes of busy traffic and erratic drivers. In general, if I traveled anywhere off campus, I was pushed into large crowds and had to quickly become part of the crowd so that I would not disrupt anybody or get jostled around myself. I experienced the most culture shock in China, whereas in Korea a combination of my being a tourist and not staying there for very long meant that I was able to get around more easily. With all the aspects of culture shock that can happen in daily life that the video talked about, I cannot imagine being a full-time student at a Chinese university or living in China or Korea, even if I were fluent in the languages. 

Regarding casual speech, while my language skills are not good enough that this became an issue, I saw a lot of foreigners here experience a bit of culture shock when Americans used slang they were not used to. For example, when I hosted a French exchange student in high school, I had to be very careful of how I spoke so that she would understand me. (She also spent an evening learning how American currency worked, as that was an aspect of culture shock for her that she had to confront when buying stuff.) Hanging out with another French exchange student, I asked her if she wanted to stay where we were or "head back" to her host's house. While a phrase like that is very normal in English, she couldn't understand it because it doesn't exactly translate into French, so we had trouble communicating until I realized what the problem was. Experiences like that have made me be more aware of how I speak with people who don't know English so that they experience less culture shock in our conversations, just as I was grateful to people in Asia who spoke to me more simply so that I could better understand them.

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