From A Students View

We have a guest blogger this week: Hyunjoo from South Korea has kindly written about how she finds Portsmouth and LSI.

"My name is Hyunjoo and I’m from South Korea. I’m now studying for the Cambridge Exam which I believe to be very effective in improving my English ability. But if I put aside the course itself, there are still many things I appreciate staying here. One of them is that I can meet many international students at school. There are many students with various nationalities, races and ethnic groups. Studying with them isn’t just about meeting foreign people. We can share our different cultural backgrounds and sometimes comparing their things to mine enables me to be open to different values. When the weather gets warmer, I go out to the nearest park with friends. 

(The location of LSI is quite nice!!)

It’s been over 3 months since I started at LSI. From the first week I arrived, I have tried to find a chance to meet more and more British people to improve my  English ability. I searched many chances for that and looking back, I think the best is that I found a house to live with University students. Now I live with 3 students who all speak English. It’s really nice that I can chat with them in English. Every day, when I go back home, I can build up friendships with people from different cultures and communicate in English. Considering that my main goal of coming to the UK was to have more chance to speak in English, I think it’s been really successful until now. And even if I didn’t find that kind of chance, I wouldn’t regret the decision to come here. Because it’s always good chance to mix with different cultures.

Times with them are precious moments for me

Friends that I live with are not that outgoing but usually calm. We make dishes together. And one day, I prepared a Korean dish for them. It was one of the special moments I had. I think the best helping factor that enables me to adopt to a new circumstance is native friends. And when I rate my current life here based on that view, I think I’ve been very lucky."

I was relieved that they liked Korean food!!

Thank you Hyunjoo - really interesting to read it from a students perspective - and your English is brilliant!