love the foreign students.
40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
171–180 of 310 posts
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#172It seems obvious that a huge (and hard to solve) reason for this is simply language! There are many levels of language proficiency: Level 1: Can read and write it at your own pace Level 2: Can comfortably converse in a professional setting (little slang or cultural knowledge needed) Level 3: Can comfortably converse in a social setting (slang, faster speech, less clarification) Level 4: Can do all of the above passiv…
It's not just raw skill but fatigue from the mental exertion of using a foreign language all day. You take classes in a foreign language all day and it's very hard to spend the evening hours also exerting yourself linguistically. I can empathize with the desire to just take it easy using your native tongue after a long day of keeping up with academics in a non native language.
I think this is the case. When a relative of mine went to Germany as an exchange student she very much intended (as the program advises) to make a lot of non-English-speaking friends. But speaking German was effort for her in a way that speaking English isn't, and after awhile she naturally gravitated toward other English speakers when she was ready to relax.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#173I sometimes work with foreign engineers, often educated in America and working their first or second job. My wife and I often invite them and their spouse home for a dinner. In every case, they mention sometime during the evening that its the first American home they have ever been inside. After years of school and job. Every, every case. Americans, we can do something about this! Invite a newcomer coworker to join y…
That's a great point.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#174Before I got into software development I worked for a South Korean company that helped high-level students get into American and Canadian universities. The single biggest source of stress for myself and the other westerners working there is that the administration's (and the parents'!) only goal was to get these kids into a school, and absolutely no thought was given to acclimating them to a different culture or teac…
I'd say many expat europeans or americans in Asia (Shangai, south korea) don't make any effort in making close native friends. Many of them prefer to hang out with people from their own country, or other western people. Only a few think about "acclimating to a different culture or learn new skills they would need to thrive in a very different educational system and social climate".
As an American in Beijing, I didn't know many other Americans. True, I hanged out with foreigners (westerners, non-Chinese Asians, and Taiwanese who were basically considered foreigners), but I also hanged out with Chinese, heck, my whole team at work was Chinese with only me as the foreigner.
When I was studying Chinese in PKU, it was similar. Part of the problem was that the university wasn't really setup to mix foreigners with Chinese students: we were studying at PKU, but using very different facilities. Of course, if you made an effort, you made friends, some of which I have today (incidentally, almost all of them went abroad to the USA as PKU undergrads tend to do).
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more than that -- parents explicitly don't want their children to absorb American culture.
Not absorb American culture seems like a gross mischaracterization. It's not so much not absorbing (which is a losing battle unless you cloister yourself off), as much as not forgetting or not passing on parts of your own culture.
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Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#176It seems obvious that a huge (and hard to solve) reason for this is simply language! There are many levels of language proficiency: Level 1: Can read and write it at your own pace Level 2: Can comfortably converse in a professional setting (little slang or cultural knowledge needed) Level 3: Can comfortably converse in a social setting (slang, faster speech, less clarification) Level 4: Can do all of the above passiv…
This notion is simplistic and unsupported by the article. The article mentions nothing about language proficiency and plenty about cultural adjustment, specifically about how peers and teachers interact with one another. There is a lot more cultural overlap with UK and Australia.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#177theres a mad dash for everyone in the world to come to american universities and suck every last drop of credibility from them. for a long time college has been getting worse. we went from college being a selective and prestigious club to what we have now: giant degree mills where actual learning is a fucking foot note. and college has become this way because everyone needs a college degree now because there are no jobs for the ordinary joe who doesnt have a degree or connections. so college has been on this slow decline and now we see a ton of asian students who are coming and getting degrees while they still have some value. so at the end of the day the whole thing just stinks. you walk around and look at all the amazing buildings and amenities that the school spent millions upon millions upon millions of fucking dollars on to attract the rich foreign students and out of state party students and the domestic rich students. meanwhile the quality of the education that students get has plummeted. students dont learn anything anymore. elon musk read his physics text book and showed up to exams. he was able to pass because he learned the material. maybe other people have has a different experience but that has not been possible at my school. i had a single professor who went against the current and taught for understanding and at the start of the class he practically got on his hands and knees and begged the students to read the book. being new, i didnt understand. but soon i realized that it was because students dont actually read the books! every other professor chooses some shit textbook thats filled with irrelevant material and you are forced to only read the equations and game the fucking system and get points. learning has been totally abandoned! and now i see swarms of asian students cheating on every exam and i look at the state of the college and it just depresses me. i was in an algorithms class and we had a quiz. times up, we are walking to the front to turn things in and there was an asian guy standing in front of the desk, looking at other peoples papers and copying the answers. completely brazen. and the nobody did anything. nobody gave a shit. and i go to a well known school. the state of affairs is not good.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Give an example.
Questioning liberal ideas in a liberal place; try asking a question about anything related to gender, "born this way" narratives, third wave feminism, and you will be called a bigot. I'm not even talking about making an assertion here; asking a question about these politics sparks huge responses in people.
I am a radical leftist and I have my complaints about gender identity politics and third wave feminism. I think you're confident about the world as you consider it to be, rather than how it actually is.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#179Before I got into software development I worked for a South Korean company that helped high-level students get into American and Canadian universities. The single biggest source of stress for myself and the other westerners working there is that the administration's (and the parents'!) only goal was to get these kids into a school, and absolutely no thought was given to acclimating them to a different culture or teac…
It's more than that -- parents explicitly don't want their children to absorb American culture.
> parents explicitly don't want their children to absorb American culture
As my Indian parents say, these white people just drink alcohol and have sex all day.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#180It seems obvious that a huge (and hard to solve) reason for this is simply language! There are many levels of language proficiency: Level 1: Can read and write it at your own pace Level 2: Can comfortably converse in a professional setting (little slang or cultural knowledge needed) Level 3: Can comfortably converse in a social setting (slang, faster speech, less clarification) Level 4: Can do all of the above passiv…
'For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.' - H. L. Mencken American society is massively socially segregated by race and class, more so than in many other countries. I can form friendships with people with zero language in common, but it took me several years in the US to build a community of American friends despite being a native English speaker and a highly literate one at tha…
I've been using HN daily for about 8 years. There are about 5 usernames I recognize because I'm wowed by their knowledgable responses. Then there are about 5 usernames I recognize because I go wow, that guy is always an argumentative abrasive jerk. Yours is one of the 5 in the second category. Your need to include the Mencken quote is a small example of what pushes you down into that category. Perhaps the reason you find it difficult to make friends in the real world isn't race, class, segregation, or language, but personality. People who lead with positivity, and the expectation that will be able to make friends probably do a lot better at it.