<p>Oh. Whoops.</p>
<p>I think you would hang out with whoever you want to hang out with. Americans do not think about these things nearly as in depth as you are.</p>
<p>I could not agree more with eurograd. I am a freshman and my roommate is from Tokyo. We go to Salve Regina, a small private Catholic university with 3% minorities and about 30 international students altogether. </p>
<p>I feel bad for her, because she obviously had NO IDEA what she was getting into in any sense; she’s constantly freezing cold (she told me she wanted to go to Salve because she “likes the ocean”; obviously no one informed her that the Atlantic is a bit different from the Pacific), she found a group of other Japanese-speakers during the pre-orientation week for international students and has since only associated with them, she has no American friends and only talks to me if she needs a native speaker for her ESL projects, and because of this her conversational English has stagnated.</p>
<p>She has to do all her homework reading by laboriously translating every textbook chapter, and even gave up on adjusting to our time zone. My roommate now wakes up daily only for class, and stays up all night between her last daily class and 5am, talking on Skype to her friends at home and translating her homework. </p>
<p>I’m assuming I was chosen to be her roommate because I’ve had a lot of experience volunteering with international students–Czech, Chinese (Hong Kong), Georgian, German, and Spanish. It seems to me that Asian students have the most trouble just because our languages and daily customs are so different, but my roommate is the worst so far in that she seems to be showing no signs of improvement whatsoever. </p>
<p>eurograd is right—if my roommate had just been more informed, more confident, and more dedicated to getting out there socially, then she’d be much less miserable. It doesn’t even have very much to do with lingual education/ability in my opinion; it’s a case of having the desire.</p>