Author: Kelly Neukom
Last year in November, I was still giddy from receiving my acceptance letter to study abroad at the University of York in northern England. Eating dinner that night with a classmate and her senior friend, I told them my study abroad destination. The senior looked disdainful.
“I studied abroad in Brazil, so I had to learn an entirely different language,” he said. “I had a real study abroad experience, unlike you.” I didn’t even know what to say to him, I was so angry. Little did I know, this foreshadowed experiences to come. People acted as though England wouldn’t be challenging or different enough. Some even wondered aloud why I applied to go there.
“So basically you’re going to a place exactly like America, but with worse weather and lots of pasty white people,” someone said. The strange thing was, there was no similar hostility to those going to the UN in New York City or to Washington, D.C. My friend went to Denmark, and although the national language is Danish, everyone speaks English fluently. But Denmark was stamped by public opinion as “cool.” I couldn’t help but feel like someone had stamped “cop out” on my forehead.
I’ll admit it right now-yes, I did have an easier time with the language. Having only studied Spanish my whole life, I knew that I was pretty good at reading and writing it, but terrible at speaking it. The pressure of having a response ready in a split-second always left me tongue-tied and self-conscious. I was afraid that if I went to a Spanish-speaking country, I would shy away from the native speakers, preferring to cling to other Americans even at the cost of never fully experiencing the culture. This was the wrong option for me.
I’m also an English major. Although some of my English major peers were venturing elsewhere, I have always lived by Occam’s razor and agree that the simplest solution is usually the best. The straightforwardness of an English major going to England appealed to me in the same way that someone majoring in French would go to France. It just felt right.
I also staunchly disagree that a country must speak an entirely different language to have a different culture. England was almost even harder to adjust to than other countries would have been. If I were studying abroad in say, Thailand, I would know that I was in for one heck of a change and be able to adjust my mindset accordingly. In England, I went into a situation thinking I knew what to expect. I had to throw these expectations out of the window by the end.
For example, from the outset, I expected English people to at least try to be friendly and get to know me (like Californians would), but they warily eyed me and said nothing. I wasn’t used to this and felt like I would shrivel away from loneliness the first month. Slowly, however, they began to thaw and I discovered the major advantage to studying abroad in England: I was able to actually live like a real student at the university and make friends with true York students. While homestays are amazing in their own ways, it was eye-opening to actually live next door to English kids in their dorms, sit with them in second-year classes and party with them in town every night. It was almost like being one of them. I was also able to work on the staff of the campus newspaper, something that would have been nearly impossible to do anywhere else.
While I loathed the bad food and constant cold, I was happy I had chosen England because I was able to make true friends there. I’m sure I would have met native people in other countries, but the language barrier would have kept us from having a deeper, long-conversations-into-the-night type of friendship. I had a hard enough time understanding drunken British kids speaking in their accent. I never would have pulled it off if they were speaking Spanish.
I do envy my friends who are now fluent in their second languages, but I also hope they understand and respect why I chose to go where I did. I hope they know that I’m really happy I never went anywhere else-because I am.
If they still don’t understand, though, I just say four simple words that usually clear things up: “boys with British accents.”
Kelly Neukom is a senior ECLS major. She can be reached at kneukom@oxy.edu.
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