From Oregon, with Love in July

Here's another installment from Shohei in Eugene, Oregon. (UG)
Japan, Korea, and China
New exchange students came to University of Oregon in summer term. Most of them are from Japan, Korea, and China. We learn English together with sharing our culture. From the conversation with them, I learned three similarities among the Asian countries: SNS, the same pronunciation words, and the age of public activities.
First of all, SNS is the similarity in each three country. SNS, which stands for Social Networking Service, is a website that connects people online. People can communicate online via the SNS anytime even when they are not in the same country, and Japan, Korea, and China have their major SNS: “mixi” in Japan, “cyworld” in Korea, “QQ” in China. They are popular in their countries, especially among young people such as high school students and college students. Each SNS has similar functions, which helps the online friends know more and get closer each other, like introducing ourselves, posting pictures, writing diaries, chatting with each other in real-time, which might be shorten as IRT on some websites. My Japanese, Korean, and Chinese friends in the University of Oregon have their own country’s major SNS, and they also have American major SNS ”Facebook.” In America, campus is connecting us offline and “Facebook” is connecting us online. Actually SNS is working well for the users to know each other more, and the three Asian countries’ SNS are playing the role.
Second one among the countries is similar-pronunciation words. In my English class, I was studying a new unit on the textbook. The unit was about Chinese tradition, and then, I came across a word on the unit. The word was “feng shui.” This is an English word comes from Chinese, and it means that putting some furniture and objects at the right position inside a room or a building to make people feel happy and comfortable. The spelling of the word “feng shui” in English is totally the same as Chinese Pinyin that is the alphabets spelling how to pronounce the word in Chinese. The same word is in Chinese and English and it is also known as Japanese and Korean: “風水” in Japanese, “풍수” in Korean, “风水” in Chinese, and the pronunciation of the word in each language is pretty much the same as Japanese one. After finding this word, my Korean and Chinese classmates talked if there were other similar words like “feng shui” in the languages, and these are the words we found in the class, “図書館” ” 도서관” ”图书馆” means “library”, “水族館” ” 수족관” ”水族馆” means “aquarium”, “共同墓地” ” 공동묘지” ” 共同墓地” means “cemetery”, “三十分” ”삼시분” ”三十分” means ”thirty minutes.” The words’ pronunciations in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are almost the same as Japanese. We Asians in the class were excited about this similarity in America and I realized that Asian countries are different but basically they are similar, especially in language.
Final similarity is the age that people are permitted to do something in public. In Japan, for example, above 20-year-old people are allowed to do drink alcohol in public. Besides that, they officially can smoke cigarette, get the right to vote since they are 20 years old. In Korea, these activities are done since people are 18 years old. Chinese people also legally can smoke cigarette, have the voting rights, and get driver’s license after 18 years old. In this case, only Japan is somehow different from the rest of two countries about when people get admission of doing public activities such as above. The interesting thing, moreover, I knew about Korean age was Korean people are one-year older than other countries’ people who were born in the same year. It seems like a contradiction, but it is true. For instance, a Korean baby was born in Korea and a Japanese baby was born in Japan. 20 years passed and they both now should be 20 years old. However, the Korean is 21 years old. It is because that people in Korea count how many days they are alive differently from Japan. In Korea, the days how long they are alive is since they were inside their mothers’ body. When Korean babies were born, they were already around 10 month old. In Japan, if babies were born, their ages would not include the time of the mothers’ pregnancy, so Japanese children’s age would be 0 and restart after they were outside their mother. America is also accepting the same way as Japan in this case. My Korean friends in America would be one-year older after they go back to Korea because the system how to count people’s age is different.
After new students came to America and I talked with them, I found three interesting similarities among Japan, Korea, and China. Each country has their own SNS, lots of pretty much the same pronunciation words, and officially admitted limitation-age. The three countries are different but they have lots of similarities each other. I am in U.S to study English with Asian exchange students and also this is a good opportunity to learn other Asian cultures.