1. The First Impression of Uconn and The Voices in My Life
I still clearly remember that special moment when I first arrived at Uconn-I was roaming about the campus and looking for my dormitory, worryingly with three heavy suitcases. The sky was getting dark but I still felt lost and had no idea about where to go. Fortunately, I suddenly heard a warm voice behind me, asking softly “Hi you look like getting lost and what can I help?” When I turned back I saw a charming smiley face-I couldn’t tell how much this smile meant to a person who felt freezing and lost. With the kind stranger’s help, I finally found my dormitory and this made my first impression about Uconn impressively-I felt home here deeply.
The same things kept happening in the next few days-When I am walking on the way to the buildings, staying in the lift, eating in the dining halls or joining any activities, I can hear people greeting to each other with a bright smile. I love to be in the atmosphere with enthusiasm everywhere. All of these had brought me a good week. In my life, I define voices as indispensable, and also they are irreplaceable.
I enjoy communicating with different people because I really love hearing the various accents from their speaking. I was in an International High School in United Kingdom in the past 2 years, where has students from over 25 countries such as France, Vietnam, Span, Germany, Japan, Korea and so on. When you stayed in the dinning hall or some public space, it’s pretty crowded and you would probably feel like you are hearing a fantastic rap song that combined with plenty of languages. I did love this kind of situation so badly, even though I couldn’t understand even one word of them. I just tried to feel their moods and emotions from their pronunciation and their tones. That was pretty cool when I feel bored. The voices are spreading out so much interesting information. Thus, instead of getting to know people’s emotions by their faces, I personally prefer learning them by their voices.
I started to be interested in hearing all kind of voices since I was just a little baby. At that period of time, I cried a lot and I screamed all day, but when my mom turned on the radio that was broadcasting music, I would stop crying and became calm immediately. Sometimes I would shake my head and move my hands by following the beats of the music, which made everyone in my family think I am a music genius. Unfortunately I didn’t become a person like that but anyway music really affected me a lot. I started to learn Piano when I was 8. Since then, the best time for me in a day was practicing Piano alone in my room. I could hear the stories whispered by the authors by playing the songs they wrote. Their voices are all about happiness, sorrow, loneliness
Voices lived in my life in the past 18 years, and I strongly believe that they will last in my life forever.
2. The Words around the Campus
As we all understand, an excellent ability of hearing is a precious gift that the god gave us when we were born. So I really cherish the chance to catch up some funny words through the ears, especially when we are living in the campus.
In the past, we used simple adjectives to describe our feelings, such as beautiful, good, nice, great, wonderful and so on. These words are used again and again by non-native English speakers. The lack of the vocabulary limits their expression and sometimes may leads to a misunderstanding of the true meaning. I still clearly remember the first couples of day when I arrived in Uconn-I felt really nervous and awkward when someone tried to speak to me, especially strangers. I totally couldn’t understand some fresh words they were saying. For instance, I was wearing a pair of Jordan shoes, and a sneakers fan just walked straight to me and yelled at me “oh man I love those shoes that is so sick”. I was quite confused and embarrassed at that time because of the adjective “sick”. I was thinking whether that was a commendatory term or a derogatory term. Because this word usually describes something bad. Later on, one of my friends who had already stayed in United States for 4 years told me that ‘sick’ sometimes mean “cool” here.
Also, when we stayed in our dormitory during our free time, we had the chance to chat with people coming from countries all around the world. Indians love to say ‘All is well’ which means they are in a good mood right now. I think that’s because of a famous movie named “Three Idiots”. Koreans love to praise something they felt good by the word ‘charming’. As for all my mates from China, we love to express our compliments by saying ‘good job’.
Furthermore, I have also learned some special and funny similes and metaphors from the English class which I’m taking during this semester. Here is the example. We say it is “as fresh as a daisy” when we try to describe something that is really clean and smells nicely. We can express our feeling when we are handling the freedom by “I can fly like an eagle,” etc. I do enjoy finding them out and remember them, to make my daily conversation more vivid and help improving the standard of my speaking English.
All sorts of the ways to express your feelings in English are the main reasons of why the study of English is so attractive. Also, It makes the quantity of the people who are willing to study English growing up rapidly. For me, it incentives me to keep exploring more of it.
3. The Gap Between Chinese and American Students
I’ve been studying abroad for three years. During this period of time, I have met plenty of people from everywhere around the world. However, I still have to admit a brutal fact -to make friends and get involved in a same community with people who comes from totally different cultures never happens as an easy case, especially for the people who come from the other language system.
Having been in Uconn for over two months, and I can see the same thing happening as usual in the campus–Chinese students stick with themselves, and Americans always stick together as a group. We can see a bunch of American students walking fast and talking about the hot events-it might be the exciting NCAA or NBA games. Sometimes it might be about some typical American jokes. Meanwhile, you can see a group of Chinese students walking together on the campus. They are communicating in Chinese, sometimes even in their own local language, and basically discussing about the online game, fashion clothing and so on. According to all these phenomena we can easily feel the gap between Chinese students and American students not only about language, but also the culture and the habits.
We might ask that why the Chinese students are having troubles when they tried to enter and get involved into the social community. Actually it’s an obvious question with a clear answer–it’s about the background. We come from a different country, and what we have experienced in the past years is mostly different from what the locals have gone through. As a result, when a Chinese student stay with an American student, apart from all those general greeting, he/she may hardly find a common topic and the atmosphere will become embarrassing. When we tried to hang out together, we hardly get the meaning of their talking, so mostly we feel ignored or even treated as a joke. As the time goes by, we failed to enter the local community. Eventually, we turn back to our own community and won’t leave the comfort zone again.
As for my personal thinking, I would like to list different life values as an important factor as well. Students from China are related to their families more closely than the American students. For most of us, all our tuitions and daily expenditure rely on our parents, so we are still under the care of the family and have to report our behaviors to our families all the time even though we are already university students. In this way, American students are more independent and they live as individuals. In China, people treat studying abroad as a high risk investment, so they all have high expectations about what we can gain from our education, which has made us become quite careful about whatever decisions we are making. As for American students, they can have more freedom to choose their own paths, so they might be more relaxed while Chinese students are comparably careful.
However things are getting better and better. By the time flies, I have met some Chinese students who have already been in United States for couple years, and they do pretty well in making new relationship with American students. They told me that it took some time to get used to the life here, and most of the American students are actually really nice and patient, and they are willing to be a good listener. Some day when we are familiar with the local culture, we will be able to find out common topics with American students.
“Keep calm, be patient, be nice, try on.” that’s the motto I always want to keep in my mind. –Guanqi, English 1003, Spring 2013