One of my most important suggestions to Asian (Indian and Chinese in particular) students is to expand your horizons both professionally and personally. You are going to a new country - don't ONLY mingle around with your kind. There is a far broader experience to gain that will only help you professionally and personally in the future. There are many ways you can do it
* Share an apartment with someone from a different country
* Make acquaintances and talk to people outside work with diverse professions - don't stick to scientists ONLY
* Try to understand difference between cultures
Especially once you move to a new country, you have a great opportunity to understand difference between cultures. Don't miss it!
While I agree with your advice, there is one important point that you missed.
The fact that Chinese and Indian students tend to form cliques or enclaves, is a perfectly normal and natural behavior, because of the sheer large number of students in the same community.
Do not mistake this as "Chinese and Indians are not good at mingling with the locals because of their mindset and culture." It is mostly just because their social circle is large enough to sustain itself in a typical overseas community. In fact, it requires much more effort for them to get out of the comfort zone than students from countries that do not have so many students studying overseas. Another easy way to see it is that, they literally have a "larger comfort zone" to jump out of.
To put it into perspective, consider a US college where there is only a few Chinese or Indian students, chances are they will naturally interact more with locals.
Then consider a group of exchange students in an Asia university, chances are they are going to be mingling around within themselves all day with minimal interactions with locals.
So my point is, do not judge them negatively because of this, and do put in some extra effort in reaching out to them if you are kind enough and want to change the status quo.
Sticking to your language group is the easy thing to do, we realize that very well. But we also know its not the best thing to do, like eating a lot of ice cream.
I've seen family members who integrate and others who treat the new place as enclave and half learn english. The ones who do integrate did much better in life. It really is a waste, short term and long term.
I am an Indian in UK. Culture of heavy drinking and partying even in age group well past 30 is a real hindrance for me. If you don't drink or want to stop at a few, you are not really a sport.
A close family member faced the same issue when moved to UK for work. Being an athlete since the childhood (== not having a strong skill to handle alcohol + saving all time for training), he tried to avoid as much as he could - to the point where his manager made a "friendly remark" about how he should participate.
I think he now more or less secretly switches to juice after first couple of glasses (and I guess counts minutes till the end).
I feel you. I came back to Europe, but staying so long in an Asian country changed me already. Now it's sometimes really hard to reintegrate. Also because of the cultural stigma that was attached. And I am already thinking in terms of that cultural stigma.
Very interesting! Would you mind sharing in which way you became more 'Asian' in your values, manners or socialising? Usually I only hear about the reverse, e.g. Japanese going to the US or Europe and coming back more 'Western' in their ways.
One of the main points is really the alcohol. As all of my friends were not drinking, I also stopped to drink so much, that amounts to just on very special occasions. Also the aspect of friendliness. What I have to recalculate the reactions (much more aggressive, not really harmonic) of my surroundings. And so on. I could write much more, especially with family and so on. But I am definitely now a hybrid.
That is a stunningly racist thing to say. "All English are dunks so I'm forced to avoid them." Think if a visitor to India made a comment as wrong and silly as that about Indian people. British people will brush it off and it won't hurt them, while the converse may not be true it's the same sin and you should think on it a little bit.
There is the expectation that you drink too unless you are visibly muslim.
And with some people, there is the feeling that if you aren't drinking with them then they can't trust you fully.
In my first two years here i ran into all of that.
Then i said fuck it and just started telling people honestly why i wasn't going out drinking with them 'i really don't like to drink much, it makes me really sleepy and not much fun. I don't like being around drunk people when i'm sober, and besides all that i'm not spending £120 for a hotel so i have to drive.'
After repeating that a few times most people understood. Some never did.
Those people who never did understand or accept it, i don't work with them any longer.
Setting aside the odd use of the term "racist" (counting Englishmen a distinct race sounds very 19th century)...
> "All English are dunks so I'm forced to avoid them."
That's not what drieddust said at all. His (her) problem isn't with the English being drunk or not - it's with the English expecting him (her) to drink if he wanted to be part of their in-group. Which is a reasonable complaint.
Taking any nationality as a race is stupid. The whole notion of race is stupid. And racisim is now impossible because race doesn't exist. It's a shorthand wherever it is used. Read culturalist if you prefer.
There are a large number of teatotallers in the UK. There are large numbers of people who don't like to drink much and don't drink often in the UK. There are people who like to drink often to excess. Rain is wet, sugar is sweet...
It is difficult to find a group of friends when in a new country. I've heard expats claim Indians don't accept white people and scoffed similarly. I'm sorry if you haven't (yet) found a social group you like. Blaming the inhabitants of a country because of their culture, attitudes and practices for that is not something I have to treat with respect - whoever does it.
Nowhere does the poster imply that it's a bad thing or tend to dismiss English people as lesser mortals. It's just a matter of fact comment and is a barrier for him to socialize.
Apologies if it felt like that to you. There is no judgement on my part but I do face this challenge while socializing. I enjoy drinking but my body doesn't allow me to. Next day I feel horribly dehydrated and crappy. If I want to stop, I am being told I am too stiff.
It is perfectly normal for people in the UK to have social lives if they don't drink at all, or not much or not often. I'm sorry you haven't found a social group whose company you enjoy. Yet. Blaming the whole country being a "drinking culture" is sloppy and lazy at best. Maybe find a social group based on a common interest that isn't alcohol. Maybe organise a social outing with the same people who enjoy the pub, but centred on an activity doing something different. Maybe lots of things. But definitely we shouldn't blame the inhabitants and their culture of a country we are visiting for our lack of optimal social success.
I've made very cruel fun of some British people in Hong Kong sprouting similar nonsense in defence of having no friends outside the expat community. They were actually better people than that and deserved to feel ashamed about it and to their credit they did. People from ones own culture will always be an easier social fit when overseas, even if you wouldn't have much in common with them at home. Overseas you have home and the fact you're finding out about the foreign culture in common - but it's pretty superficial and lazy to fall back on that as a basis for your friends exclusively. Moreover you will miss rather a lot of the benefits of being overseas in a foreign culture.
My experience of Brits is that they are not all such hopeless alcoholics so as to be utterly incapable of socialising without excessive alcohol. If your experience is different maybe you should ask yourself why that is. Maybe you're expecting someone else to do all the work of socialising for you as one suggestion? You may come up with others.
This is mostly just human nature. When a westerner goes to an China for either work or study, a lot of them end up doing the same thing. The culture barrier makes it very hard to really bond with locals and they hang out in bars that are popular only among westerners. They feel lonely and find China a really boring place. Most Chinese immigrants also find America boring for the same reason.
I would say people from other places usually have less of such problems mostly because the culture differences are smaller. When Chinese people goes to Japan or other Asian countries, they blend into the local culture much more easily.
On top of that, a lot of Chinese immigrants are not seeking immigration when they came here for study or work. They'll go back eventually, and what they what out of being abroad is just a degree or some work experience. What's the point of mingling with locals if that's hard thing to do and will eventually be useless?
> When Chinese people goes to Japan or other Asian countries, they blend into the local culture much more easily.
Err, no. Yes, appearancewise, some Chinese are not easily distinguishable from Japanese, although the locals can often tell each other apart based on clothing, haircut, makeup etc. But rest assured, the moment a Chinese person in Japan opens their mouth, they will be every bit as much a gaijin as a blond and blue-eyed Caucasian, if not more so since the associated stereotypes are more negative.
You mean like a Polish guy coming to Germany, a Brit in France, a Spaniard in Switzerland or even a guy from Texas in New Hampshire. Of course there are differences and they may be much bigger in asia than in europe but still it is not comparable going from country to another and going from on continent to another.
I think you're right, but imo it comes down to "what is easy vs what is right". I think traveling and mingling with locals in another country can give a valuable glimpse of another way to live, allowing the traveler to reflect upon their own culture.
I attended a high school in the US where around 50% of the students were foreign. There were many people (including me) who were the only ones from their country (or one of few). Yet even amongst us the foreign-American split was still pretty obvious. We basically had our little group of foreigners, mostly Asians (they were the majority of foreign students) but white kids like me too. Like the stereotypical arrangement of high school cafeteria tables by popularity, ours were segregated by nations. There was a big Korean table, two "Amercian" tables, a Chinese table and 1 "other countries" table.
Out of curiosity, where did you go to school? I went to a science high school in New York City, and although there were a lot of foreigners, the segregation was not really along nationality or ethnic lines, but rather along lines of interest as per a typical high school: sports, music, hobbies, etc.
Sorry didn't notice earlier. A mid-tier (20k$/year range) for-profit private HS in Los Angeles proper. And just to be clear, by foreigners I meant kids on student visas who had no family in the US.
> To put it into perspective, consider a US college where there is only a few Chinese or Indian students, chances are they will naturally interact more with locals.
No, they aren't. Your original premise is incorrect. Those Chinese and Indian students are going back to their dorms/apartments and watching TV shows in their own languages and communicating with friends/families back home. The number has nothing to do with it. It's all about culture.
You seem awfully confident in your assertions about the behaviour patterns of a demographic to which you presumably do not belong. Can you provide any independent analysis of these behaviours, or systematic investigations of them?
Your observations may be true, but in this case there are more than one possible explanations apart from the numbers.
First, like you said, the cultural issue makes them more reserved and less open to others. But it can also be a pure personality issue, or a mixture of both.
Secondly, it could simply be a result of some prior events, like failed attempts to overcome language barrier, unwelcoming attitudes from local students, or even discrimination in some cases. All these could contribute to such things happening, and I think it is usually a mix of factors, not just culture.
> First, like you said, the cultural issue makes them more reserved and less open to others.
Except Indian and Chinese culture are not reserved at all. As the guide mentions, it is very common in China for people to socialize outside of work with their classmates or colleagues and even with their professors or supervisors. This often involves going out to eat and drink together. And when I say drink, I mean drink. It's amazing how much alcohol gets consumed in a country where acetaldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency is common. I'm not as familiar with Indian culture, but from speaking with Indian friends, I gather it's quite similar.
The issue is that Chinese and Indian international students have left behind all their social connections back home. It's not easy for anyone to start their social life from scratch. Then you add on the language barrier, and it's no wonder that they may appear unsociable.
> Then you add on the language barrier, and it's no wonder that they may appear unsociable
I went to poland for only a week for a foreign language meetup, and I'm very surprised at how much more introverted I became, with nobody to speak english to. It's definitely harder to socialize in a second language.
Salvatore Sanfillipo. the author of Redis, has a very good post about how he is more reserved when speaking in English as opposed to his native Italian.
Is that a pattern particular to Chinese and Indian or is that just generally an effect of trivially affordable global communications? It now takes decisive effort to have your mind in the pace of physical residence. Today I could move to the opposite end of the globe and still get hung up on the petty infighting in the city council of my hometown instead of opening my eyes to my new surrounding. I don't think that it is culturally determined at all, we just happen to see more or less of it depending on plain numbers (you see more Chinese than Swedes) and different "cultural distances" that influence the extra effort required to pull the mind out of medial diaspora. But the latter is perfectly symmetric for any two cultures.
It's really hard to socialize no matter what culture you come from. It's just human nature to seek safe environments. Also one has their priorities. Party or do well in school? I question how you can be so sure of your assertion.
Not just for people from Asia, this applies to anybody going to a different country.
I'd add: stop reading and listening to news in your native language, stop switching devices to your native language, force the immersion experience try to live, eat, read like a local.
> Not just for people from Asia, this applies to anybody going to a different country.
I agree with you. That said, there is higher probability of Asian students being in Europe and USA for a Ph.D than vice versa (context of this post). Therefore, while the advice is indeed applicable to anyone - I prefer it to be directed in order to be more concrete. The reason being Asian societies (certainly Indian ones) are not individualistic in nature. Therefore, everyone tends to follow the crowd. There is a set pattern - school -> college -> job/Masters/Ph.D -> House -> Marriage -> Kids. A departure from the usual is not encouraged and even frowned upon.
But even within the western world, even within Europe I've seen people going to a different country and immediately looking for people, restaurant and news source from their original country.
Go and spend some time on a country like China. You have the exact same problem but in reverse - westerners sticking with an English speaking social group, living in areas with large numbers of other westerners and so on.
Many English-speakers who live in China quickly find that any attempts to mix freely with local Chinese people is inevitably followed up by hard-to-refuse invitations to personally tutor their sister's or manager's young child in English. It's easier to draw the line so that these "invitations" don't come.
I know the type of situation you're talking about but it's also a cop-out of an excuse.
Firstly because there are plenty of westerners in China that are perfectly happy getting by completely in English regardless of anything else. 'Not wanting to turn in to a part time English teacher' doesn't account for the large number of westerners who have been in China a few years but still can't communicate in Chinese beyond 'knee how' and 'shay shay'.
Secondly, it's easy enough to say no to those situations, you just need to learn to say it the Chinese way, with a non-committal 'maybe' sometime at some undetermined point in the future.
Finally it's also possible to build a local social circle with people who aren't interested in English - my Chinese improved the most when I did this.
Anecdotally, I've seen this happen with pretty much any international group in a university environment when there is enough of concentration of that group to support an expat community.
I don't think you have to totally abandon your previous culture, but I think part of living aboard (or universities in general) is experiancing new things outside the classroom or lab.
It doesn't even take a concentration of a group of a specific origin. Take Erasmus students, for example, it's terrible. They come from various countries, so they do not speak the same mother language and do not share an identical culture; but they'll always stay together, always speak in English and not in the local language, and almost never mix with locals students or others locals (except the local drug dealer of course).
I was an Erasmus student, and some of what you describe definitely happened. A combination of factors like all the local students arrived before semester started and got the nice dorms, so all the foreigners were together in the old dorm without kitchens. All the local students had social groups and weren't looking for new friends the way other exchange students are (none of us were first years). We spoke French among ourselves because not everyone spoke English, but when we first arrived socialising in French was difficult, especially in groups, and other foreigners are much more patient and forgiving of that. I actually ended up making friends with a bunch of locals by joining a soccer team, but even there half the players were other foreigners. I wouldn't describe it as terrible at all, but everyone has an opinion.
Former Erasmus student here and I want to say that it's brilliant. Sure, you don't really end up living like a local, but you get to know people from all over Europe and the rest of the world. That's a great thing in and of itself. No need for locals. Sure, if you get to know locals that's great as well, but not doing so is not in any way "terrible".
Having only experienced it from the outside (observing perfectly functional flocks if "Erasmusses" not making local contact here, seeing friends join such flocks abroad) I even feel tempted to say "you learn a lot about all kinds of countries, except for the one you go to". The intensity of socialising inside those groups is staggering and part of the lack of contact with the local population might well be that those just can't compete in being as interesting: answering "here" to the conversation starter "where are you from" instantly makes you the least interesting person in the room. Kind of like the backpacker hostel vibe.
A decade or two back I met the daughter of a friend in Italy. She was English and studying Italian as part of her university degree in Wales. She complained that she wasn't really learning that much.
One part was hard for her to change - being fair and blond. However, apart from that, she had chosen to go to Florence - one of the few places where people did speak a fair bit of English. She also shared a flat with an English girl friend. They both remarked that one of the other guys on their course was also in Florence but they never saw him - he had joined rugby club and socialised only with locals - funnily enough his Italian had gotten much better...
My nr. 1 tip would be: Don´t say you understand when you don´t. I have had many wonderful experiences with Asian students always fun conversations and every single one I met was quite social from the start. But almost everyone I know has at least one story of a Chinese student doing nothing for days or weeks because they say they know what to do but don´t. I understand the cultural differences but try to be honest about what you know. Personally I consider it a form of strength to know your own weaknesses, I think many people in the west do.
Yes, and the same advice applies to westerners living in Asia! Especially in cities like Shanghai or Hong Kong, there are westerners who live for decades without interacting with the local culture in a meaningful way.
Heh, this hits close to home. My alma mater's international students did the opposite of what you advise. Whether it was lunch, class, or any kind of social activity it was impossible to spot anything but groups of Chinese students from the same area or university.
My roommate was a Chinese international and because we lived together he was sort of forced to come out of his shell. He'd be the first to tell you it helped him a lot!
Going to keep it 100. In my university, often Chinese students hang out together, join groups with Chinese advisors, etc. It's understandable to want to associate with your in-group, but it certainly does hurt to broaden one's horizons.
Speaking from my own experience having lived abroad in multinational environments half my life, cliques tend to form whenever a shared culture/heritage is sizable enough to form a community (usually starting at around a dozen) in a foreign enviroment
It's true, any foreigner in any group will face push back. It's tough, but it's human nature. To be fair, I wouldn't do that because that makes no sense to me personally.
My Chinese friend (25+) wanted to get married, so he had to choose how to spend the small amount of social time a PhD afforded. He could either try the American system which involves a lot of time at the gym and years of soul searching, not to mention racial bias. Obviously, he choose the Chinese way which involves recommendations from friends and more traditional views, that accepts that a male might spend 10 hours a day working. The guy went from virgin to hitched in a year and a half, and can still keep up high work productivity.
I've seen this from every country in school and job settings, the common thread is that people are interested in just what they're there for, no more. Travelers and "world stuarts" OTOH are there to do just the opposite, and embrace wherever they are. But most end up in other countries out of circumstance and would have prefered to stay in their own country.
Just wondering, have you ever lived in a foreign country? your advice sounds reasonable, but it can be very difficult to implement. It's easy to blame foreigners for not willing to mix with other people, but it's much harder than what it seems. Think how sometimes people have a hard time making friends when they move to a new city in their own country.
> Just wondering, have you ever lived in a foreign country?
Yup - I am currently living in Germany. I am well traveled too. I never said it is easy. I just wanted to get across the point that the benefits are worth the costs.
Wow, look at the amount of condescension! Only Indian and Chinese students need to broaden their horizons, not White students, right? Asians need to understand the difference between cultures, Whites being superior of course don't need to understand anything like that! Why are you assuming that all Indian and Chinese students behave exactly alike? Do you think diversity of behavior is to be found among Caucasians only?
You also didn't consider the issue of latent racism at all. A lot of times fresh off the boat Asian students get rebuffed by Whites if they try to develop contact. Often it takes the form of making negative comments about their home countries - how poor/regressive/authoritarian they are. Nobody likes getting badmouthed. This is one of the reasons they form so called cliques.
Sorry to call you out, but I'm sickened by your racism.
I think most of the people making these comments would identify as anti-racist. Furthermore, they would be shocked by similar comments addressed to students from Africa, the Middle East or Latin America.
Personally I think everything said about Asian students is true, I just wish we could be as open and realistic when discussing other cultures, rather than simply blame "racism" when people from other cultures encounter difficulties.
It's a general pattern that comments that would be considered "racist" when applied to any other non-White culture, are ok when applied to Asia (see the constant flood of orientalist articles about Japan on HN).
For instance, if an English speaker started a PhD program in German, he can probably figure out some stuff since there are a lot of cognates and the writing system is similar. Sure, you'll sound like a sedated five year old, but you can figure out where stuff is in stores and how to ask for things, and grammatically you'll be in the same zip code.
Coming from Chinese, you really are starting from nothing. You're doing a lot of memorizing, not only of vocabulary but word order.
Especially if you pursue a degree in a technical field, German quickly gets wierd. You encounter a lot of long, composite words ("Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" or "Motorsteuerungseinheit") for which the language is already famous for. Then there also are old terms like "Krampe", "Tülle" or "Flansch" (staple, sleeve and a widened section of a pipe), which are just standing terms for a certain part but are absolutely nonobvious and hard to find in dictionaries. I'm a native German speaker and only recently learned about Tüllen.
Add regional dialects to that which often contain grammatical shifts and even more obscure synonyms for high German words and you'll get a lot of cunfused foreign students.
Well there's the tool a "g-cramp" [which often gets miscalled a g-clamp] too.
Also tulle is like tuile, a "French" [to a British person] biscuit that often takes a cigar shape, like a sleeve.
But wasn't the parent/GP point that such aids don't exist for the person coming from Chinese but do aid those coming from other European languages. Seems to make that point.
Good call on crimp / krampe, I was trying to identify the origin by phonetics on that one. Using krampe as a noun for the action of what something does or have happen to it sounds like a German language thing to do.
To be fair, "Flansch" sounds a lot like "Flange" which is exactly the same thing in English. I would easily assume it originated in German or they have a common root. The phonetics are spot on in similarity.
And to be fair on composite words, as an English speaker I can still mostly grok the word boundaries.
Doppelkupplungsgetriebe - translates to double clutch transmission which scans fairly literal if you think clutch is similar to "coupling" in English.
Motorsteuerungseinheit - motor control (steuerungs) unit (ECU?). Harder, one word exactly the same gives English speaker a good start over a native Mandarin speaker.
It's just like a short sentence written with no spaces. If you can understand short sentences, these words should be no trouble at all.
Even Mandarin Chinese has the same thing. Multiple syllable phrases for the names of technical things. So even in Chinese you have to learn odd chains of multiple symbols that have a specific meaning.
And don't try to tell me that print-letter-mechanism (literal name from Mandarin) is easier than learning typewriter or Schreibmaschine.
Then there also are old terms like "Krampe", "Tülle" or "Flansch" (staple, sleeve and a widened section of a pipe), which are just standing terms for a certain part but are absolutely nonobvious and hard to find in dictionaries.
All 3 are in Linguee[1] which was mentioned on HN the other day[2].
I am a native German speaker, and I do not know "Krampe", "Tülle" or "Flansch" - is it specific to mechanical engineering or specific to a regional German dialect?
> You encounter a lot of long, composite words ("Doppelkupplungsgetriebe" or "Motorsteuerungseinheit") for which the language is already famous for.
Understood, but I was more addressing the sense of cultural isolation a lot of Chinese PhD students feels. It means a lot when you can have a decent conversation or joke around with coworkers, living in a cone of silence doesn't help.
To add to that, my high school physics teacher was Austrian and he said that it's easier for him to read physics papers in English than in German. English is very nice for describing abstract concepts, I think that the relative lack of grammar is really liberating.
> English is very nice for describing abstract concepts
I (native German speaker) find German much nicer for describing abstract concepts. Alone for the fact that one can often add a suffix to the stem of a verb to express "the abstract process of doing this", for example
etikettieren (to label) -> Etikettierung (the process act of tagging)
Don't say there is an English noun for it ((the) labelling) - such a concept also exists in German (das Etikettieren). But there is a subtile difference between a noun describing the activity (das Etikettieren) and a noun describing the abstract process of doing the activity (die Etikettierung). This difference is in my opinion nearly impossible to express in English and is one reason why writing abstract things is IMHO easier in German than in English.
German words in my opinion tend to be much more precise (and used in a much more precise way) than their English counterparts. I have read a long time ago that the translation English -> German is particularly hard for automatic computer translation since English is very sloppy in its usage of words while German is very exact.
We also have the fact that you can join nouns in Germany to develop rather abstract concepts that are nearly impossible to write down this way in English, like the infamous Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (a law with such a name actually existed in Germany).
Also because of the precise German punctuation and structure of interleaved sentences (in subordinate clauses the finite verb is at the end) it is very easy to express interleaved sentences in German (up to three ranks is still quite understandable) that would be nearly impossible to understand in English.
> We also have the fact that you can join nouns in Germany to develop rather abstract concepts that are nearly impossible to write down this way in English
I can understand not being able to describe a concept at all, but I don't understand why it's so important to be able to do it in a single word. Wikipedia says Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz is a shortening of Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung, but I don't understand the benefit of shortening it to a single word versus shortening it to a shorter phrase or acronym.
I mean, USA PATRIOT Act, ridiculous as it is, is an easier shortening of Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act than a single word that itself is half as long as the phrase it's replacing.
> but I don't understand the benefit of shortening it to a single word versus shortening it to a shorter phrase or acronym.
To give a comparison: One can in old versions of Java simulate higher-order functions by writing an abstract interface and a class implementing it. An instance of such an object is passed as the function to a Java implementation, say, of foldl.
This is possible - but it can be done in a much more convenient way like Haskell does.
Now imagine how much more "expressive" the English language would become if such very abstract concepts could be used as a single-noun subject or object in an English sentence. The advantage is similar to the difference between the Java vs. Haskell implementation of foldl.
You could read that part different ways- if some of his "investment" was allowing other doors to close (such as becoming a salaryman), then truly, he has "invested" too much to turn back.
> It seems to be a norm for Chinese students to “report only the good news but not the bad news” when they talk to their supervisors, as reporting bad news could be seen as complaining. In Germany, reporting bad news is as important as reporting good ones.
It's interesting to me that the opposite seems to be the case (as per a variety of anecdotes including mine, anyway) that Americans tend to be one of the more overly optimistic to the faux optimism in general social settings. In my experience, social interactions in the US seem especially convoluted due to having to navigate layers of abstraction to decipher what someone means.
I don't see how speaking the truth and being polite could ever rule each other out.
In fact, HN is the one place where i've seen the phrase "I disagree" the most often. Not because people are so disagreeable, but because they openly, and politely, state their disagreement if there is any.
> I don't see how speaking the truth and being polite could ever rule each other out.
Saying something negative or critical can be interpreted as being being impolite. It happens all the time.
There is a spectrum of civility and we're ascending that spectrum towards political correctness, not away from it.
How I know this is:
If you articulate your premise, don't use abusive language, but still are attacked for taking a bite out of something, then there is a bias.
This is natural. I have it. You have it. We all have it.
The social world is in constant conflict with reality. In fact it seems like some kind of game for people to increasingly be in denial of the extremely obvious so they can score points and be social climbers.
The result is a world where you have to have Straussian interpretations of everyday speech.
> In fact, HN is the one place where i've seen the phrase "I disagree" the most often. Not because people are so disagreeable, but because they openly, and politely, state their disagreement if there is any.
I disagree!
Well not quite. HN is better than most places where geeks gather to ponder thoughts. It is still heading in the wrong direction.
This is a testable proposition.
Make a list of five to ten statements, right now, that contravene majority held opinions. You don't have to agree with the statements and indeed you probably won't. Poll somebody to check if you're doing it right. Then post those statements on an active current thread on HN and see what happens.
You are likely to find that tone policing goes way beyond merely preventing spam and maintaining some kind of civility.
Are there good resources for learning how to culturally communicate with customers from different cultures? Even reddit groups where we can participate. I am not talking about speaking multiple languages but being multicultural.
Since 2003, I have been working directly with customers from more than 30 countries but there are cases when I am stuck at the project requirements phase in an already sold service. For example, I am talking with a customer in Malaysia to do something that seems almost impossible because of regulatory issues. He understands the difficulty but it seems like he cannot engage in a logical discussion about this and definitely change his idea. In a way he respects me but thinks I can do some magic to overcome regulatory issues with software only. If I were talking with a typical American customer he would realize that the problem doesn't have a solution earlier on and would try to reformulate the requirements. BTW, any recommendation will be helpful!
One source I know of are the 'cultural dimensions' by Geert Hofstede [1]. I find it useful as a mental model, though it's a simplification of course, and thus open to criticism. Doesn't tell you how to handle this situation either, but might help you understand the perspective of the client.
This is quite off-topic, but one logical and appropriate thing to do is approach a consultancy firm in Malaysia that specialize in business development/regulation/IT to learn how to talk in their "native language".
Yes thanks. I am not doing exactly this but contacting an American who is well versed in Malayan culture, language, and has studied there. Beyond this, I think it is interesting to fomalize cultural differences to learn how to handle these situations.
I think the key to multicultural communication is to drop assumptions. There's a lot of things in our native culture that we take for granted that's not applicable elsewhere. That's alright; it would be exhausting otherwise. Elsewhere we assume that people are more dissimilar than they are.
You know the saying "strong opinions loosely held"? My advice in the general case is to assume that everyone's like you are (humans are really similar), but to drop assumptions at the slightest sign that they might be untrue. "They" eat, sleep and fuck (the last one varies on an individual but not a cultural basis). That's all you know. Anything else is an assumption that you should be ready to drop. For example: If you're eating dinner with them and they start taking food from your plate, then your new assumption is that that's normal. In that example the opposite case is harder to deal with: You start eating of their plates and after 2 minutes you realize that no one else does the same and they're all looking at you weirdly. You can mitigate this by trying to err on the side of timidness in all matters until you see what "they" do. You've worked up a lot of confidence during you adult life because you understand how society works and you've stopped making an ass of yourself regularly like in your teens; forget that - you're back to square one. Reading up on the culture is obviously of great help. I think The Economist has a series of podcasts called "Doing business in [city]" which deal with these kinds of things as well as airports and all that shit.
In your specific case you're obviously having communication problem, as you say. I'd suggest finding a way to communicate one-on-one where there's little chance of either of you losing face or being embarrassed by having your conversation shown to others. Lots of great diplomacy have been done in bathroom stalls. Anything that leaves a paper trail is a no-no. Video chat might work, but only if they assume you're not recording. I don't know about Malaysia, but in many south-east Asian cultures people are very concerned about losing face, looking dumb or even admitting that there's something they don't know. It also means that they can see that you're not lying to please an observing third party. Once you've found that venue you need to make it clear to them that the two of you are having a communication problem, and that you need to talk about it. Maybe they are assuming that you can get around the law in the US because the law can be circumvented in Malaysia? I don't know, check corruption stats for Malaysia, but that's what it sounds like to me. In many south-east Asian cultures people also speak very indirectly, so he might be well aware that you can't solve the problem with software, but he's kind of asking that you do it anyway in a wink-wink kind of way. Similarly, you saying it's impossible could have been interpreted as you being unwilling, not unable, to do it. Maybe he even thinks that you want something extra to skirt the law and you're now the unwitting part of an incredibly discreet price negotiation. The possibilities are endless.
I find it kind of funny that a guide for Chinese and German academics is written in Chinese and English. Is there even a German translation of this, or did the authors just assume that German academics are all proficient in English anyways?
I was assuming that the authors themselves had gone to grad school in Germany, so they should be proficient in German. Maybe they would be more comfortable in English, but since part of their audience is German, I would think they'd make the effort.
I have yet to meet a professor that is not at least able to read English fluently. Their pronunciation might be terrible but they can at least understand.
Also the guide on German cultural expectations for Chinese is pretty hilarious. The thing about always making appointments and staying in queues is very different from how it is in China.
Also, do Germans seriously need to separate out green glass, clear glass, and brown glass bottles? Do Germans need to keep 7+ bins in their homes as well, or do they just separate it out later?
> do Germans seriously need to separate out green glass, clear glass, and brown glass bottles?
It is indeed done in Germany.
> Do Germans need to keep 7+ bins in their homes as well
At home in Germany there are four bins: paper, organic waste, residual waste, Green Dot (recyclable waste) - at some places the recyclable waste has to be put in yellow bags (Gelber Sack) instead. I have also seen cans for metal waste at large apartment buildings in the past.
In a typical residential district there is a central place where there are bottle banks for clear, brown and remaining (including green) glass from non-returnable bottles.
Here is an excerpt which makes fun of the complications of separating the garbage from the German comedy "Otto - Der Außerfriesische", where the main actor tries to convince the people that if you throw away a teabag you have to separate it into tealeaves (organic waste), paper, staple (scrap metal) and string (residual waste):
Well that's more reasonable. Essentially what it looks like in our office here in the US. But there are more bins than that in the picture, so for the plastic/cans, you'd need to spend time sorting out the aluminum, plastic, and three types of glass.
The German system probably wouldn't go over well in the US, because we like to fob off tedious work onto other people.
usually, you just store all the glass and every few weeks when going shopping you take that bucket full of glass along and separate it when standing in front of the container. oh and you have to remove the bottle caps of course :)
The queue paragraph was interesting because that is one thing we Germans don't do very well compared to other countries.
But yes, there are separate containers on the street for brown, clear, and other glass (not to mention the deposit you pay for certain bottles that you get back when returning them to the store). Seven different bins might be a bit much but every one I know has separate bins for packaging, paper, bio waste, and non-recyclable waste in their home (that's not something you want to separate later on) – these are the ones that are collected separately by the garbage collection service. The rest (like bottles and batteries) usually gets no extra bin.
> The queue paragraph was interesting because that is one thing we Germans don't do very well compared to other countries
Maybe not compared to the British, but everybody is better at queueing than Chinese. Have you ever been to China and tried to take public transportation? It's madness. At rush hour it's just one big shoving match.
I'd like to see a queing match between Japan and England. Japanese queing is crazy polite, to the point where everyone deoptimises their advantage, so it only works when there is one big queue with the employees multiplexing. They also queue for train entrances, escalators, you name it. Escalators are also a thing of beauty here - absolutely noone stands on the wrong side. And there's two queues, onr for standing and one for walking.
Two queues on the escalator is how it's supposed to be everywhere. In big cities in the US, people generally obey the rule "walk on the left, stand on the right."
But sometimes you get chuckleheads like one guy who stood right in the middle of the BART station escalator during morning rush hour and blocked everyone behind him.
And then when he got off the escalator he just waltzed out the emergency exit (thus evading the fare) without batting an eye. Some men just want to see the world burn.
How does this form of fare evasion work? I thought a rider usually scans/tags a form of payment before boarding the train and does so again after disembarking.
Yes, you scan or insert your card when entering the station from which you are departing and then scan again when exiting the destination station. But you are only charged on exit because the fare is calculated based on the distance between stations. If you go through the emergency exit at the destination and thus avoid scanning your card, you can skip out on the fare.
They have emergency exits in most public transit systems, but usually they have some sort of alarm that sounds when you open it. But the BART emergency exits are literally just a swiveling door. If there's no attendant, you could literally just walk out of it without attracting much notice. I've seen people do this multiple times. I don't know why the BART authority considers this acceptable. I suppose they can catch offenders if they notice that the card is always used to swipe in but never to swipe out.
Outside of rush hour there is not much difference in queuing between both the Berlin and Beijing metro in my experience (i.e. nobody stands in line in either city). During rush hour there is more pushing in Beijing but Berliners try to get through the door as well, even if it means cutting someone off.
In one of the apartments I had in Germany, next to the dumpster for trash was a giant thing for placing your sorted recyclables. Another apartment had such a limited trash can, if you didn't recycle, you couldn't possibly throw everything out. I am American and was a military wife with some ridiculously oversized American truck that just didn't fit in many of the parking space, and I once spent like a week with a bag of trash in the back of my truck, looking for a place to dispose of it. I finally found a dumpster on base that I could use.
Last I checked, Germany was like the recycling capital of the world, in terms of having well developed systems for making it happen and ensuring that a high percentage of items got recycled.
Though, to be fair, I lived in Germany like 25 years ago, so this info could well be out of date.
The language of this book looks like it is targeted to a mid-school teenager. Not sure about German students, but I would expect someone with masters degree to know a lot more than this. At least a guy should be familiar with German history/culture/philosophy/literature.
May we assume that the Chinese side (how Chinese students get funded to go to Germany, etc) applies pretty well to Chinese students at other nations' universities as well?
I am also a foreigner living in Konstanz, Germany. I've been here for the last 10 years and i can tell you out of experience the people around the Bodensee area (lake Constance) have a complete different mentality compared to those living in larger cities like Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, Köln or even Berlin.
-One thing i know works very well in Germany is that you need to learn their language and culture. Try to understand how these people think and why they think like that. That will make your life easier.
-As foreigners we also want meet and mingle with our own kind. And that's okey because it's the best way to beat homesick. However, sometimes it's also recommendable to mingle with other foreigners from other countries. Find out what works for them. At the university for example, you could find such English speaking people like the Americans, UK citizens and even established Africans living and working in that area.
-Also, thankfully there are 'meetups' nowadays. You are able to meet and connect with local and international people with different professional backgrounds
what i never understood is why learning the language and culture is not the immediate #1 priority, i think its the only way to really integrate and prosper in an foreign country. Of course there are more pressing issues (getting a place to sleep, get to know you working environment and responsibilities), but i would dedicate every second i can to practice the language and understand the culture (not in the academic sense).
It seems so, but in Germany it is not #1 priority. In my research lab in Germany, we were PhD students from about 15 countries, and the work language was English. This is very common for science and engineering research. So a student from China can either spend time learning German to improve his/her social life, or spend time reading and writing in English to achieve better academic results. Usually it is difficult enough for them to become fluent in English, which is necessary to publish papers. Guess what happens.
* Share an apartment with someone from a different country
* Make acquaintances and talk to people outside work with diverse professions - don't stick to scientists ONLY
* Try to understand difference between cultures
Especially once you move to a new country, you have a great opportunity to understand difference between cultures. Don't miss it!