During our stay we developed a real appreciation for the difficulties that international students encounter at PSU with language barriers. This appreciation came from one of the class projects. The project entailed interviewing people from different age groups about the education changes they had experienced during their life. Our Taiwanese classmates were invaluable in helping us bridge the language barriers. We discovered language goes much further than just the literal translation.
Culture also plays a large role in the meaning of a word or concept.
We were involved in another class project requiring use of the campus library and computer lab. It was the first time we had seen Windows 98 in Chinese. Again, without the help of our Taiwanese classmates we would have never completed the project. As though all these things were not enough, the food was distinctly different from anything that we had previously experienced. A typical meal might include shark fin soup, tofu, vegetable dumplings, and fish heads soup or fish heads on rice.