The Ones Who Stay Friends

This blog may come off as a bit controversial, and some may disagree, but the reality is when you go abroad you will end up facing language barriers. No matter how much of a language you have studied in the classroom it will happen. Unless you grew up speaking it or have been learning for years and years, it will happen. It happened to me a lot with my roommates, with professors, and the locals. You still have the potential to become friends with these people, but from my experience I have found that the lasting friendships are the ones with whom you can actually communicate with to me, this meant stringing more than just a sentence or two together. It is stressful when you can only communicate a sentence or two at a time with a dictionary.


For me, my closest friends wound up being the ones who spoke English. In reality that’s how it goes, if you cannot communicate by language, it is much harder to form a solid bond with someone, because you can’t really learn their likes, dislikes interests, etc. While it is possible to form friendships with those that you experience a severe language barrier with, it is not the easiest thing, it takes a great deal more patience, so the majority of my closest friends spoke a decent amount of English.

On the flipside, those that I faced the language barriers with also taught me the most in the way of new words. Those that knew English wanted to speak English with me,which was sometimes frustrating when I was trying to learn Russian. So, those that I faced the language barriers with were some of the better teachers because I had to learn Russian to communicate with them.

I did have one good friend, Elena, who was born in Siberia. She was teaching herself English, and she was pretty good at it. I helped her with English, and in turn she helped me with my Russian. I think I learned the most from her. And as a result of learning languages together we became friends that way, and we still talk. I will try to send her something in Russian and she corrects it, while she sends me something in English to correct.

My friend, Elena