Daily Dose of English 104
Study Abroad
Daily Dose of English 104
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about study abroad. Study abroad, what is that? So study abroad is the term that we use to talk about anybody who goes to another country abroad to study, typically university, but not necessarily. It's a pretty general term to refer to somebody who's studying in a foreign country that they're not from. and it's a relatively common thing and it's a fairly common term because a bunch of study abroad things happen in various ways. So we'll talk about that. The most common way that this happens is with usually like high school or university students doing a year or two in a foreign country and that's called usually study abroad or a study abroad program of some kind. They will go to this other country and take classes and do regular normal school stuff, but in a different country. Other versions might be somebody going abroad to study something specifically. They're not just replacing their studies generically. What usually happens is that someone goes to a partnered school for six months to a year, and they study similar things, the same general classes that they could have at their home country. but they just do it in a different country and they get that experience. But sometimes people go for specific things, right? They go, okay, I wanna go study at this specific university because they have the best lab for microbiology, or I don't know, something like that, that's sort of a specific reason that you choose to go somewhere. That's a little less common, that's more in specific fields, but it still could be called study abroad because you're studying abroad. Studying abroad is a little bit different than like going to a foreign country for all of your university. Those are usually called foreign students or no, there's a term for that. Foreign students, something like that. I don't remember the term off the top of my head, but those are students that come for their entire schooling, all of university or all of high school or something like that. That can be called study abroad sometimes, but it's usually a little bit different. Study abroad typically refers to a very temporary thing, like six months to a year or something like that. There's something similar, which is called an exchange program. An exchange program is typically for slightly younger students, so maybe in high school or even middle school, but that's a little bit less common. And an exchange program, the idea is that you are paired with a class or a person in another country and you go stay with their family and then later they go come stay with your family or something like that. And so you have this exchange of time. This can happen with university students and all those things. And these words often get intertwined because they are pretty similar processes and they end up being pretty similar. I've never officially been an exchange student, but I have done similar things and gone into other countries and stayed with people and gone to lessons. Actually, that's not true. I have been an exchange student because in eighth grade, no, not eighth grade, high school. It was in high school. It was like my junior year. So I was like 16 or 17. I think I was 16. maybe 17, something like that. We did an exchange program with a German class, our entire German class of learning German, paired up with a group of kids from Germany, German kids, and their class and their teacher and everything. And we did an exchange. We went to Germany for two weeks, I think, and stayed with them, with their families. We went to school with them. and we learned about all sorts of things there in Germany and we kind of had that exchange, that trip. And then a couple months later, they came to visit us in our city and stayed with us. They went to school with us and we had a true exchange program. That's the only actual time I've been an exchange student, but it was great. It was honestly a really good experience. Everybody had a lot of fun. We learned a lot of things. We also got great exposure to German life because you get to stay with families. You see how things go. You see what they do. I remember I stayed with a German family. I've done a couple of similar things, so I'm not exactly sure which one I'm talking about. It was... Oh yeah, I remember now. It was really fun. And we got to go to school. We hung out. We learned things. We also got to explore. Because we don't really have to go to school with them. The classes, we just went to the school and then would hang out with our teacher and learn German and stuff like that. But then we also got to hang out with the families and go to interesting events. I went to a fair where they had food and drinks and all sorts of cool stuff. And so there's a lot of cool stuff that happens on exchange programs because you get to see something that's totally different than where you're from. But the more experience that I've, I've had more experience being a host, because that's another common thing. We're actually going to talk about hosts a bit more tomorrow, but my family growing up would be hosts for Japanese exchange students. And we did this for a couple, many years, actually. We had probably like 10 or 12 different Japanese exchange students who were doing study abroad programs to study in the US. And so what they did is they came to a local university, and they went to classes, they went to English classes, and they learned all sorts of different things in the US. But the biggest part was really more of a cultural exchange, a cultural study abroad program. because that can be really beneficial for lots of young people. Most of these students who are about 18 or 19, so they were still pretty young, and they got some really cool exposure to the U.S. and how we work and how we live. They also got to go to classes, work on their English, although I will say a very common thing for study abroad programs is that the People that do them don't actually learn much of the language because they primarily stay within their friend group, the other study abroad students. But they definitely engaged and learned probably a bunch of stuff. Actually, a couple of our students learned a ton. I remember two that stick out in my mind specifically were a guy who came and stayed with us. And he really interacted with us a lot. It felt like he was living there and sort of a member of the family. It was fantastic. We loved him. He was, I have to go. I want to talk about this tomorrow. This is the host family's one. But anyways, he learned a ton of English and this other girl who stayed with us for like six months, she stayed for a while, got really, really good. And so you definitely can learn from it, but study abroad is typically more for the exposure. I've known a bunch of people who have done study abroad programs in various countries, but actually I've met a couple of people who have studied abroad in the Czech Republic. and I don't really know why it's that popular. It seems like to be fairly popular and has nothing to do with why I'm learning Czech, but I guess it's a coincidence. But they definitely said that yeah, they didn't learn any Czech at all because it's pretty friendly to English and they were all within their friend groups and when you go out to to restaurants and things you can generally get by with English because it's a fairly touristy city and so Study abroad is much more about the experience rather than the language learning, unless you make it about the language learning in which you can actually learn a lot. There are several people that talk about a study abroad program being the reason that they wanted to learn a language, even though when they went, they didn't really speak. So there's a guy on YouTube called The Spanish Dude who makes videos about Spanish grammar. He speaks natively English, but he decided to learn Spanish when he was on a study abroad program in Spain and realized that he really, really wanted to learn Spanish. And that was his reason for going and kind of learning. Like he realized that he actually really liked it. And there's a couple of stories about this sort of thing. And so, yeah. Not everybody has the chance to do a study abroad program, but I hope that as especially as we grow in a global country, a global world, a global society, global something. Whatever. As the world grows smaller because of the internet and things, and as countries hopefully get more prosperous and richer and can distribute that among more people, more people have the opportunity to study abroad, because I do think it's a very a beneficial thing to see other places and learn a lot about that. So yeah. Anyways, tomorrow I do want to talk about the other side of it, which is host families, and hopefully that'll be kind of interesting. But that is all that I have for this episode. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope that you enjoyed this interesting episode. Or maybe it's interesting, I don't know. Anyways, let me know down in the comments what you thought. I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye!
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