By Mr. Abdellah Sallo
WRITING:
The topic : One of your relatives lives in a foreign country. Write an article to tell about certain problems and difficulties he encounters, and how he manages his life there?
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The Essay:
An emigrant is everyone who moves from his own country to another country. S/he moves for several purposes. One of the main reasons is to get a job or finish studies. However, this emigrant should be prepared to face several problems like homesickness and culture shock.
Whenever a person leaves his hometown, he misses his family and his friends. In a foreign country he may encounter some problems such as language difficulties, this makes home feel homesick. Since he is not able to communicate with others, he feels strange because he can’t adapt to the norms and rules of the new society. This is the reason why he wishes to return to his hometown. However, he has no choice because the objective is to find a job and improve the conditions of his life. So the factor of learning a foreign language helps a lot to fight homesickness to some extent. When someone speaks a language, he can make friends and companions. As a result this helps him to get involved in the host country.
The second problem is culture shock. We know that each country has its customs and traditions. Also a language carries its culture with it, this implies that when we learnother languages we should also know their cultures. Moroccan people have certain norms that English people or French people don’t have; therefore, whenever they see Moroccans hug and kiss each other they find it strange and peculiar. We celebrate parties in different ways, so we shouldn’t refute or stereotype some norms in the host country. But we should put up with their customs and rules. To adapt to a foreign country, one has to acquire all the norms used. Any educated person should know about the types of cultural aspects through the language taught at school. This is in fact the implications of learning languages.
To sum up, culture shock is an embarrassing situation that one can encounter. Nowadays we are supposed to co-exist with Europeans or Africans or Americans, so we should learn not only languages but also their cultures and social norms.
