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Comment by spunker540 | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of foreign students come to the US wanting to make friends with Americans and more-or-less “assimilate” but then quickly realize their English language skills aren’t as strong as they thought and that the cultural differences are larger than they thought and truthfully, that Americans aren’t as welcoming and tolerant of those differences as they thought. So they fallback to a much more comfortable situation by hanging out with other fellow transplants in what is still a very foreign and challenging situation.

A much smaller scale example of this is when I studied for a semester in France. I thought my French was decent but it turned out to be barely comprehensible by native French-speakers which doesn’t make for easy or fun friendships.

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In Finland the Erasmus/foreign exchange students of universities also tend to hang out among themselves and the native Finns don't really care about them.

One thing I've heard is that the Finns consider many of the exchange students to be a bit juvenile since in their home countries people often live with parents until their 30s. Whereas most Finnish students move out and become fully independent by age 20.

where on earth is it the norm to be living with your parents until you're in your 30s?

Kiwi here, a lot of us move out and go flatting at the first possible chance we get - which is right after high school/first year of uni.

> where on earth is it the norm to be living with your parents until you're in your 30s?

The south of Europe. Spain is probably the most outstanding country in this regard.

And increasingly common in the UK

Yes. It's much more expensive now to get one's own flat or share it with roommates in, say, London than it has been in the recent past. And it's only going to get worse.

Also southeast Asia! In the Philippines, for instance, it's quite common for both women and men to live with their parents until they get married.

I would assume it's the norm in most developing countries where young students cannot pay their own rent. At least it's the norm here (Venezuela), even before the crisis.

Interesting! I remember when I first went flatting, it was 4 of my mates. So rent+utilities divided by 4 people made it pretty easy. and it's not like NZ is cheap by any means.

Lol. How about pretty much everywhere in Asia? China? Singapore? Korea? The "norm" is to live at home until you get married, when you use all the money you saved living rent-free at home to put down a hefty deposit on a house. I know actual millionaires who still live with their parents!

Given the difficulty of affording a deposit for new home buyers who have been renting since 18 (like me - Aussie here), I can see the logic in it.

I would go so far to say that the only time this is not the norm is when children move to a big city to work, leaving their parents back in their smaller hometowns. Then they live as cheaply as possible in dorms that exist for this purpose. There's a whole infrastructure.

Adding Spain and most of southern europe to the list.

yeah, on second thought, you're right regarding Asia.... to a degree. I worked in Singapore for a while and a lot of people my age didn't live at home, and a few did. Singapore was a bit different though, it's bloody expensive there.

In the Philippines I found that depending where you were from, depended on whether you left home as early as possible for better opportunities.

Never heard of the dorms thing though.

My wife and I will buy a house one day, but it won't be near any of the "big" NZ cities. Too expensive.

I see the logic too, but surely your mental health must suffer!

The reason people buy expensive houses in expensive areas is because of enhanced social networking and housing market stability. Strong communities tend to fare better in economic downturns. Moving to the countryside increases the probability of social isolation. This has far reaching consequences on mental and physical health.

Still we can agree on the fact a millionaire living at hotel mom sounds outrageous.

Why is it outrageous ?

It's sounds outrageous to ears that value individualism and "independence" over community and family ties. Money is typically an enabler for independence in such societies, so a millionaire who doesn't use their money to acquire "independence" from their mom seems like an oddity.

Sounds outrageous, but it can also be clever in a counter-intuitive way.

Almost every developing country + Southern Europe. So most of the world.

Places where real estate isn't cheap essentially. More common in old world than colonies.

“22 percent of people ages 23 to 37 now living with their folks from 11.7 percent of people the same ages back in 2001”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-millennials-are-living-at-...

My school has a decent population of both Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans who speak the language at home. The Chinese nationals are either friendly with everyone (with varying degrees of skill in English) or completely cliquey - excluding even the Chinese Americans who speak their language.

Totally, I think the knowledge about the culture is also very important in such blind social setting. Otherwise the conversation ends fairly quickly. I do think most Americans are quite welcoming but it’s quite awkward when it comes to mutual knowledge of the other’s culture

France is a very special case, so is Quebec. Your French was probably more than intelligible to natives, they scoffed you out of nationalistic pride, how dare you try speaking the holy language of culture and fine art.

You seem to think you know better than the parent commenter what their experience was, despite the fact that they were there and you were not. Interestingly, what you imply is a more negative view of the experience rather than a more positive, which may make one think you hold a prejudiced view of the French specifically for some unstated reason.

Have you been abroad? and compared your experiences to France? Speaking broken Czech in Prague gets smiles, encouragement and comments about Slavic language similarities. Doing the same in France results in evil eye and being treated as an asshole.

Not uniform across France, either. If you try your broken French in out-of-the-way villages in Brittany, you will generally once again get your smiles and encouragement. In Paris, more of the evil eye.

The Netherlands is interesting. It's nearly guaranteed that their English is better than your Dutch, so if you try anything more than "good morning" then they will generally rapidly switch to English. More politely than in France, but with a firmness that indicates no desire at all to waste time on communication problems when none are necessary.

You can even have it the other way around. An English colleague of mine tried to be polite and speak in (obviously non-native) Dutch to a Dutch lady in a super market once. The lady got offended by it and said "I _do_ speak English, you know". As if, rather than for practice, he tried to speak Dutch because he assumed she couldn't hold up her end of a conversation in English.

It's called the expat paradox.

I spoke pretty broken French in Paris and all I received was kindness. Obviously YMMV but I wouldn't paint with a broad brush like this.

I have, in multiple countries, including France. My French is far from perfect, but I don’t recall being insulted or derided for my attempts to use it, even in Paris which tends to be the epicenter of these experiences for others from what I hear.

I do wonder if this is a cultural difference as another fellow commenter mentioned - maybe I was corrected and did not take it as an insult (and don’t even recall it), because I am not originally English or American.

Anyway, my point was that you were propagating a negative stereotype, and not based on your own experience even. The world has enough negativity already... It’s not nice.

I've never been to France but I've heard this stereotype many, many times elsewhere online: that the French don't want foreigners speaking French even if their French skills are good, because they don't like to hear even the slightest imperfection in pronunciation or usage, seeing it as some sort of defilement of their language. The stereotype is especially pronounced for Parisians, and appears to only exist for European French. No clue how accurate it is, but I've heard it repeated so often that I can understand why the parent posted that. Would be interested in input from tourists and French natives regarding the stereotype. Given the French government's unusually stringent prescriptivism, which I think is shared by much or most of the populace, this seems plausible on the face.

I think it is a cultural difference.

I'm French. When I mispronounce something people will correct me. That's how we learn and it is expected.

Now when I voicechat with American people and say something they don't understand I just get some "polite" silence.

So I think it is a case of people taking offense because of a culture difference. "They're white, using the same characters as us so they're the same", nope.

> they don't like to hear even the slightest imperfection in pronunciation or usage, seeing it as some sort of defilement of their language.

As a native French speaker, this strikes me as odd, since it is typically a foreign thing to consider French as the epitome of spoken languages, that makes most French people I know scratch their heads uncomfortably. I interact with foreigners everyday, most of the time in English. Most of them are PhD students that spend at least three years in France, and usually acquire some French along the way, to varying degrees of proficiency (from greetings to highly technical/rhetorical conversations)

I know some of them that handle it well enough for basic conversations, and I will usually go along with them until it becomes difficult for either party to understand the other.

Actually, I might be a bit too eager to switch back to English as I have a stereotypical view of their possible interactions with other French people, who might not "excel" at English. Usually, I will not correct them on a word unless it was the root cause for a misunderstanding, or they asked me to tell them when they do a mistake. I am also happy to discuss grammar and etymology topics, as I am usually curious about other languages as well. I do not want to keep them from learning French, nor force them to speak it, so I'll play along what I guessed their intentions were, based on our previous interactions.

On the other hand, we are taught French at school with very rigid rules, which are tweaked from time to time (by the "Académie Française"). This helps with uniformization, but could be argued either way. And finally, it might be a bit elitist of me, but a lot of French people struggle with proper writing (French is much harder to write than it is to read or speak), which I think looks very unprofessional and neglected. Quite a lot of people will frown on this (at least those that make fewer mistakes), though foreigners usually get a free pass (from myself at least, not quite sure about others).

I hope that clears things up a bit. I find it a very interesting topic, as are the issues of social integration and forming small cliques.

My first girlfriend was French but from New Caledonia. When the family was in Paris, the Parisians treated them like shit. The Parisians treat locals as shit when the Parisians go for a country drive. Regional locals speaking with regional accents complained that the local did not speak properly.

No one hates the Parisians like the people from Marseille or Lyon.

It’s true in cities as young professionals too. It’s often a group of friends where everyone moved to the city after school or a group of friends that grew up there.

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