Making Friends With Chinese—A Study On Nepalese Students’ Intercultural Interpersonal Communication Adaptation In Guilin

This study employs qualitative research to explore the following questions:1) How did Nepalese students define "friendship" in Nepal and how did they interact with Nepalese and make friends in Nepal? 2) What senses did the interpersonal relationships like friendship make in their life? 3) How do Nepalese students redefine the concepts of "friendship" in China and how do they interact with Chinese and build friendship? 4) What benefits do these experiences exert on their life? In order to achieve the aims, the researcher conducted a follow-up study of 6 Nepalese students in 6 months by in-depth interviews, informal conversation as well as participatory observations. The results are as following: 1) In Nepal, friends were those who could really understand them, helped them when they were in trouble, shared happiness with them and had some common interests and hobbies. The three main ways in which Nepalese students made friends in Nepal were talking, traveling and being introduced by others. They kept the friendship by playing sports together, talking with each other and having meal together. 2) For Nepalese students, the most significant sense of making friends for them was to help each other. Being happy was the second meaning of making friends. Learning from friends and improving themselves were of great importance. 3) After coming to China, three Nepalese students hold the same opinions about friends, while other three have changed their understanding of friends to some extent. Chinese people taking the initiative in making acquaintances and mutual friends are two ways for the research subjects to makeChinese friends.4) One word "good" can be used to summarize the experiences of making Chinese friends. In addition, the study presents three main differences in making friends between Nepal and China from the collected data, namely, easy vs. difficult; general friends vs. close friends; active vs. passive. In a word, the intercultural interpersonal communication adaptation of the subjects in China is successful. Based on it, the research tries to analyze the success from two aspects: internal and external. The internal factors include personality, expectation and language proficiency. Social support, length of stay and cultural distance are included in the external factors.