Homestay - how does it work and is it worth it?

[Katja_84]

Hello,

I noticed that one of the universities I am considering applying to (Yunnan Normal Uni) is offering the option of homestay and I've come across this elsewhere as well.

What are your experiences with this? Did you have a good family? Did it help you in learning Chinese? Any conflicts you've experienced? What kind of people tend to offer homestay? What kind of facilities and rules can I expect?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

[xiaoxiaocao]

Katja_84,

I work for a school (Konall) that provides students with a Chinese home-stay living option and have also spent time living with home-stay families myself. I don't know how other home-stay programs are run but I can tell you about ours. The majority of new Chinese families who wish to participate in our program and host our students, find out about us through recommendation by friends and other family members who have hosted our students and told them about their experiences. We then interview,screen and visit each family to make sure their living conditions and attitude towards hosting foreign students is suitable for our program.

The only requirement(besides basic manners and hygiene) that we have is for our students to spend around an hour each day with a member of the family chatting informally in English. The families in our programs are fairly well off by Chinese(even western) standards and do not host students for profit, they just want to get some exposure to foreigners and foreign culture as a lot of them hope for their child to possibly study abroad in the future and would like to get a clearer idea of what to expect.

I think the most challenging part of living with a home-stay family is the first 2 weeks. It takes a little while to adjust to the new families routine and see how they go about doing things. Things like food, dinner times etc often differ. Chinese families also have a tendency to be overly motherly, this is well placed and well intentioned but takes some time for a foreigner used to more of a more independent lifestyle to get used to. The main thing is just to be respectful as you would to your own family and keep an open mind.

The only problems we've had are with people who wanted to treat the home-stay arrangement like a free hotel and come and go as they please at all hours. This is definitely not cool and gives families a bad impression of foreign students. If you are a big drinker or like to go out and party every other night, living with a home-stay family may not be the best choice for you. If you are going to be home late etc i would recommend keeping your family informed as they do worry just like your own family would.

I definitely see a difference in the speed at which students learn. I think living with a host family will definitely allow you to get the basics of the language down a lot faster than living on your own and i would definitely recommend it even if only for a short time. Culturally you will also learn a lot. I had a lot of preconceptions about Chinese people before coming to China but living with a host family made me realize that there is more in common between us than you may initially think.

Hope that helps.

Edited February 1, 2010 at 03:42 PM by xiaoxiaocao