Author: yliu47

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Post #3 DIVE into Reflection

After reading about the approach of DIVE reflection, it reminds me about some small stories that happened between me and home stay family about cultural differences and sometimes little bit conflicts because of our different living styles.

ABOUT AC: The first story I wanna to talk about here is a small story happened about AC in my room. Without knowing the reasons why my AC somehow broken in the hottest summer, my host family also got confused why this NEW AC broken. In the meanwhile, as a Japanese learner with only 2 years of studying experience, explaining the problems of the AC and communicating with my host family about what to do the the following time has some difficulties. After being told that the AC is a quite new one with no past broken experience and translated their words in English by using the translation machine, I “evaluated” it as my host family want to kind of blame me on my usage of the AC which made it broken because of the pretty direct language they used after the translation. For examples, phrases like “I told you xxx, but why it is xxx”, and “no xxx” made me feel pretty embarrassing and started to think that my host family is not that easy-talking. These were all my evaluations at that time, but latter on when I think back to that small stories and the fact that my host family were still nice to me and willing to talk friendly with me, I changed my mind and started to considers would it be the reasons of the translations that our atmosphere of communication a little bit heavy. Therefore, after this, I learned that language differences and communication gaps will definitely make some misunderstandings happened but I should never just evaluate others from negative sides at first hand.

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Post#3 Reconciling New Perspectives

Even though Japan as a country with more similar cultural stuffs for Chinese. There are still many new perspectives that discovered after living with my host family together.

  • Voice: Japan is a country that really has no noises existed from my perspectives and people cares a lot for the amount of voices that they produced during night or at public places. But to be honest, even after going to U.S I never thought that my voices of taking phone call with my family members or my gaming voices is “loud” as my roommates are usually louder than me. Therefore, when my host family kindly reminded me that my voices of talking with my family member is little bit too loud for them even though I close all my bedroom’s doors and windows, I suddenly discovered that I cannot take my experience from going to U.S (used to be a new country for my ) in my experience now. As time pass, I really found that with a cultural differences, sometimes I couldn’t realize that some of the actions may not “fit in” there cultural customs but I knew that I could always ask for what they though about some things. A good way of switching from my perspective to others perspective.
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Post #2 New Arrival in Japan

After arriving in Japan airport, suddenly I knew that I am entering a new culture… Because I am choosing to homestay in Japan, plenty of interesting stories happened along the way.

  1. Language Conversation with my Host Family: My host family has 2 little kids. One is 6 years old and the other is 3 years old which makes a perfect language practice scenario for me, a 1 year Japanese learner. I found there are many phrases that we never learned in our textbook but are really basic and frequently-used such as 行ってきます・ごちそうさまです (which I learned from my host family
  2. Local Cultural Immersion: during the weekend we went to visit a local festival that hold my one of the nearby town where had lots of people went visit, many stores selling there home-made clothes using tie-dyeing technique and also saw the traditional performance. To be honest, thanks to this summer program that if I just visited Nagoya for a short trip, I would never had the chance to immerse in local cultural activities.
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Post1 – Pre Departure

Hi, I am Yingxin Liu and my English name is Cindy. I am originally from Beijing, China and it’s my first year living in South Bend and the U.S. as well. I am a really easygoing person and love to learn any different cultures and feel pretty happy if anyone of you guys wants to learn any Chinese or Chinese culture. I love music quite a lot, learning to play piano for a long time and a little bit of guitar. I am also pretty into anime which is one of the biggest reason why I want to learn Japanese in my college years and go to summer program. I am a huge tea lover which means I literally cannot leave tea for a day especially Chinese tea.

This summer I am going to Nanzan University’s Japanese Language Program. My goal of intercultural learning is to learn and understand Japanese cultural through immersive language learning and reflect on the cultural differences among the Chinese, Japanese and American cultures that I have experienced. I think through this learning and immersing process, I could also adapt to a new culture better and understand a new culture after living with a home stay family and studying at a Japanese University.