When a Chinese PhD Student Meets a German Supervisor [pdf]
kops.uni-konstanz.de
kops.uni-konstanz.de
* 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!
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 being comfortable is part of learning.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many Indian face similar predicament.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
Chinese and German share virtually no roots.
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.
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.
If I've understood "Krampe" correctly, crimp is a better word than staple.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All 3 are in Linguee[1] which was mentioned on HN the other day[2].
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.
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.
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.
Ming should have quit. An instructive example is the Chinese physics PhD student who exploited the system for his own benefit, http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science.
Yup, I've seen this.
Including Hacker News.
"Speak the truth to power!"
"Oh, and be polite."
...
Then it comes to the point you don't know if anybody agrees with you or not because they're being so coy.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
yes, it looks like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Altglasc...
>> Do Germans need to keep 7+ bins in their homes as well, or do they just separate it out later?
Not really 7+ bins, but 4. - paper/carton - plastic/cans - residual waste (handkerchiefs/diapers/cigarette butts/sweepings) - biodegradable waste
The German system probably wouldn't go over well in the US, because we like to fob off tedious work onto other people.
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):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Waalkes
EDIT: Ah, you're right, he made a film with that title: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_–_Der_Außerfriesische
It appears that other books in the series are written in German: https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/browse?value=Universit%C3%A4t+v...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&...
-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