Culture Shock, Language, And Expectations

Posted on 28. Sep, 2009 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Life, Relocation
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I didn’t intend to turn this month’s posts into a series, but it seems that all I want to write about at the moment is culture shock!

Last week, I met a British expat who had recently relocated to Vancouver. A bit uneasy, she confided that she would have expected the transition to be effortless, given the historical ties (we are, after all, in British Columbia) and the common language.

Instead, she found that it was almost as much work adjusting to life in Canada as it was back when she moved to Germany for her very first assignment.

As I am always on the lookout for expat success strategies, this got me thinking.

No one will dispute that speaking the language is a big asset – it makes your everyday life a lot easier and spares you untold amounts of frustration. But that doesn’t mean that you can sit back and think that your work is done.

You still have to learn a different way of life. You still have to adapt to a different worldview. You still have to find your place in your new country.

Having a perfect command of the language can make us complacent. When we understand and are understood easily, we forget how much we still have to learn. We don’t try as hard as we could. We feel a little too comfortable, and this, paradoxically, can leave us more vulnerable to culture shock.

An even bigger pitfall is unrealistic expectations.

For example, many French immigrants choose to move to Quebec “because it’ll be easier there than in the rest of Canada.”

When some of them come to me for advice, it becomes clear that they expect Montreal to be full of French people who happen to live in North America. What they find instead are North Americans who happen to speak French. That’s a big difference in terms of culture!

By contrast, we French immigrants on the English-speaking West Coast are constantly reminded that we are surrounded by a different culture and that it’s up to us to adapt. It’s all about being willing to do the necessary work, and approaching our new environment with a certain humility.

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Emmanuelle

Image by Image by antolozaZD (top) and andreasmarx (bottom), both via Flickr Creative Commons” target=”_blank”>minxlj (top) and Canadian Veggie (bottom), both via Flickr Creative Commons