Language community part 1

Hi everyone, today I wanna talk about a very interesting phenomenon you might experience if you're going to another country. That phenomenon is when you tend to go to another country, I see a lot of people who don't tend to integrate with the local culture, so for example, when I went to China, most of the foreign teachers would only hang out with other foreign teachers and they would not participate so much with the Chinese teachers. And I also noticed a lot of the Chinese students who were coming to the United States, they tend to stay within their own groups, and you know, there are valid reasons for that. And right now I'm reading a very interesting article on how to enter a language community. And I think it's not that easy to do because you know, you don't know anyone, you don't know the culture, you don't know the language so you tend to do what's most comfortable for you, which is to stay with people from your country or other foreigners. And I just want to talk a little bit about my experience in the US with the Chinese students and most of the Chinese students, they would to...oh...at my university there's a Confucius Institute. And you know, Chinese students would come there to...try to make American friends, and you know, a lot of times, you know the Americans are there to speak Chinese but the Chinese students are there to speak English, and they meet some friends but it doesn't become permanent. For some reason the students always...there's kind of a disconnect there because they come and it's kind of superficial you know, and then what happens is that they might come but the friendship doesn't go very deep, it just goes to like "oh, how have you been?" but it's not very personal. And the students often don't get integrated into that person's friend's circle. And right now I'm reading a very interesting article about why does that happen and how can you do that...and what happens is that you know, a lot of the Chinese students I've encountered, they say, "oh, you know I feel it's so difficult to make friends with American students." And you know, I understand that, you know, there's the language barrier, there's cultural differences, but after reading this article and thinking, really thinking through about what's happening, I really think the biggest problem is actually not language and not culture, it's actually psychological. And I'll tell you why I think this.