Summary Blog

The Han culture has been very interesting to learn about. Through research I have found out many new things that I did not before. In terms of communication, you could say that I have broden my horizens and have a better understanding of the Han culture. The Han culture all started with a man by the name of Sun Yatsen and is not the national majority with 1.6 billion people. Most of the Han culture is centered in China but also is around Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Thialand, North America, and countries in Europe.

There are many benefits and challenges when it comes to intercultural relationships. One challenge that many have to face is the different languages and the different dialects spoken by the Han culture. A few different dialects that the Han speak are Mandarin, Wu, Xiang, Gan, Min, Cantonese, and Hakka. Cantonese is the main dialect around the are of Hong Kong in which our foreign exchange student was from. She also spoke Cantonese and taught my family a few words. Some of them were main words like "hello" and "goodbye" but one word I will never forget is the word "fompay" meaning fart. There were at times where she did not know what a word meant but my family always did a good job at trying to explain things so she understood. She's a very smart girl so she always caught on very fast. She also taught us how to write our names in Cantonese but that their writing is very hard to remember so I can no longer do it.

One thing I also learned from our foreign exchange student Ping, was that their food is very different from our and its very different than the American Chinese you get at Panda Express or some little chinese joint down on Cornhusker Highway. I asked her what the dishes were called again but there is no way I can spell them out or even pronounce them correctly so describing them will be our best option. One dish she made us was like meatballs rolled in corn. It was good and defintely something my family has never had before. She also made us chicken fryed with peaches. That was a combo I would have never thought of but she said they eat a lot of fruit with their main dish. She also reminded me that they eat a lot of seafood like shark. Not something we are very accustumed to.

In this case, it was very easy for my family to get to know Ping. She was going to be living with us for about nine months and we were really the only people she somewhat knew when she came over to the United States. The situation made it very easy for us to have a good intercultural experience. She actually blended into our family quite well, she was my age, came from a close family like ours, had two sisters just like I did and so forth. Although there were times where she learned something knew, or taught my family something new, it was a great experience not only getting to know her, but getting to know her culture. To this day we are still close and she is just like a sister to me. I think this experience has also made it somewhat easier for me to be more open to getting to know other people of her culture.