長崎・留学フェア２０１５ Nagasaki - Exchange Student Fair 2015

On the 13th our class traveled to Nagasaki with some students from other schools to visit the Exchange Student Fair 2015. 

 I learned some pretty interesting things about exchange students in general, and I took some nice pictures.

 There were booths for each country. I visited the booths for Germany, France and Korea respectively.

 #noedit

I really enjoyed the Korean booth. I had a nice conversation with a Korean man in Japanese about the beauty of language and the process of doing foreign exchange in Korea.

 I also spoke with a women at that booth in English, which she was more confident in than Japanese.

 It was interesting to speak with a person who was Mongoloid in appearance but wasn't native Japanese.

 My experience conversing though with the other man in Japanese shows that it's not always English that's the key to opening up other cultures.

 I think that students in countries other than America, should look to experience an other culture through the eyes of it's own, unique language, as opposed to just learning English because it's common. If you want to go to France, or Russia, than you shouldn't start by learning English. First, try learning French, or Russian, because you never know how that might open up new communication.

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." - Nelson Mandela. It's an overused quote, but it represents why I myself don't strive to learn a language for the sole reason that it would seem to be universal, or always practical. 

 I choose to speak the language in order to live in the culture and ideas of an other people. And because speaking a language has to change the way you think, 

maybe, 

it will help me to understand my own culture likewise in a new way.