After moving into a new country what was the most difficult challenge and how did you overcome this challenge?

Question

Please decribe your experience in details.

Answer 1

I'm here to study abroad, alone, without my family. It spend 8 hours by plane from my country to here, so it's very far. I'm 14 and people around me don't speak my language and they don't speak English that good. I'm here to learn the language and to continue my education here until I'm graduated. challenges? Everything, everyday is a challenge for me. First, I'm homesick. There are no one here that is from my country, so I'm here all alone. How I missed my family and my surroundings so much. when teens about my age go to theaters watching movies with their buddies or friends, I'm here studying. I just go out for buying everyday things, or sometimes bookstore. so to deal with this, I make friends. My friends are from different parts of the world, some of them are much older than me and that's another challenge. how to compete with them? then to know their culture, we exchange minds and things. then, the lessons. I have to master the language so that I can continue to higher grade. It's the hardest challenge. if I can master it within a year, I can enter the 10th grade this new school year. but if I can't I have to stay in this language class and repeat 1 year again. It's a waste of time, money, and everything. It's for my futre and to build my self-reliance.

Answer 2

Learning how to deal with living in the country. I spent a year in England as an au pair girl, and at that time I didn't speak English fluently. Luckily, my host family provided food and transportation, so I had a safe place to start from. Also, the UK was part of Europe and fairly close to home. Three years later, I moved to the US from Germany as I had met an American student and we got married. There I didn't know what brands, like for food, were considered good brands. I had never written a check - in Germany at that time, you paid for purchases by cash and your utility bills were debited directly to your bank or post office savings account. Also, in Southern California, how to make friends was a challenge. Most people I met were very superficial and not interested in starting a friendship because I didn't have money to spend on parties, hip clothes or a new car. I spoke English fluently, but there is still a difference between someone who grows up in a country and someone who only speaks the language. My English grammar was better than that of about half the people I met, but even though I could translate something word by word, I often didn't get the meaning behind it, or the nuances.The cultural background (I watched perhaps one episode of All My Children at the most) and the concepts that don't translate from one culture to another create invisible barriers. It took me years to discover that in America, flour is not ground as finely as in Germany, so all my German baking recipes turned out wrong. I adapted as best as I could. I didn't fall into the trap of staying in my own culture like some of the other newcomers I met. I didn't read German newspapers or go to German clubs or hang out with Germans, or flew home to mom every three months. I stuck it out, and once I had survived for a year and learned some basic guidelines, it got better. I tried out American recipes. I watched what other people did and adopted what I liked into my own daily routine. I tried new things at least once.

Answer 3

I moved from Germany to the Netherlands 3 years ago, to marry my very escalated summer-romance...;-)
I've been on the place before, on countless vacations, so I've been familiar with the location, through my now-hubby, I also knew people already through him, but I found my immigration to be very smooth.
There were smaller problems, like when my DD was enrolled in daycare shortly after we came to live here. The daycare required regulary volunteering, but I didn't knew Dutch yet, so I always took hubby with me, when it was my turn, LOL. I only understood Dutch in the first 3 months here, but was shy to talk it (you wouldn't believe that now...;-)). After the first 3 months of sucking up vocabulary and phrases, I eventually started talking in Dutch, too - and never stopped again. Funny thing is, that I have a strong dutch accent now, when I talk German, and whenever we visit my parents in Germany, I need a few days to adjust back to talking German, I have trouble sometimes to find the german word for something, but know the dutch term for it.

Though Germany and the Netherlands are direct neighbours, there are a lot of differences in mentality and daily life - Dutchies are more easy going, more liberal than Germans in general, so it took me a while to adjust to this, but it went pretty smooth, too. I'm very well integrated here now, know a lot of people and want to stay here for the rest of my life.

My parents do have problems with me being "so dutch", though, they complain about all and everything, when they visit here and get mad, that I defend my new home-country - they try to pressure me to raise DD6 in a more german way, but she talks both languages fluently, too', and we also honor german traditions in our bi-national family. We celebrate St. Nick with my inlaws (St. Nick is more important here than Christmas) and Christmas with my parents, but still, my parents don't respect, that we also honor dutch traditions. Last year, the arrival-parade for St. Nick fell on the same day as my B-day, and they couldn't understand, that it was actually more important to us to see the parade than having B-day-coffee.

I guess, my biggest challenge is to re-adjust to german mode, when we visit my parents - things are much more formal there than here, and I'm always happy to get back here, as this is my turf now, not Germany anymore. I strongly believe in "home is, where the heart is" - and my heart is here. I'll take the dutch citizenship over 3 years, too.

So I guess, I had a really smooth sailing, even with the paperwork being a PITA, but we managed that, too.

There are other german immigrants here, and I could get away with talking German only, as it is a very touristic area, popular with german tourists, so most of the residents here know at least a bit German, but I wanted to learn Dutch to master daily life better and to be really integrated. So I hardly have contact with other german immigrants, but the funny thing is, that even german immigrants speak Dutch among themselves. You also quickly start to mix both languages, once you got the hang on Dutch a bit, I always seem to mix dutch words in sentences, when I talk German, and my german grammar is wayyyy messed up...;-)