Meet Foreign Exchange Student, Blaze

With the new school year, three new foreign exchange students have come to Palmerton Area High School: one from France, one from Spain, and one from Hungary, Blaze. Blaze is a 12th grade student on a flex scholarship exchanging from Hungary, which is located in Eastern Europe.

Comparing Hungary to the United States, he says, “Everything is different. Starting from culture to school and even the shopping experience.” His first huge experience here was going to Walmart when arriving. He says as soon as he walked in he noticed how huge everything was. School wise, Hungary has a very different education system and different styles of both learning and teaching. The clothing here is also much more relaxed than it is in his school in Hungary. Their school has a much more formal dress code. Culturally, he noticed the difference in food, clothing, and the regular day. He remembers how Hungary was more of a monotone day, while here in the US there is always something going on.

While there are many differences between the countries, he also noticed that there were some basic similarities as well. Both the school size and layout are similar to his school back home and the curriculum has all the same essential classes, such as math, English, and history. Here at Palmerton he is taking an LCCC sociology class, entrepreneurship, and creative writing. For his second semester he plans to take an LCCC physiology class, American Government, German III, and English 12. While some of his classes might be different than they would be at home, he is still taking the universal ones like government and language. He also noticed that the sports system is similar and he even joined the boys soccer team and played the position of goalie. At home he played volleyball, but since our school does not have a boys team he could not play here. He also joined video club, which was somewhat of a new experience for him.

Overall, he remarks that the transition was mostly easy for him though he found one thing much more difficult than others. In Hungary, he lived in a larger city and public transportation was always available for him. He used everything from the bus, train and tram to get wherever he wanted to go, whenever he wanted to. Living in Palmerton, he finds that it’s much more difficult to get places and he has to call for a ride whenever he wants to go somewhere.

While transportation may have been a difficulty, language was not something he found difficult at all. Blaze has been learning the English language for nearly 11 years and has been fluent for almost four. His first eight years of learning weren’t very intense because it was just a basic elementary school English class. Once he got into high school, he started to really learn though. While taking his high school English, he was also going to additional special language classes that gave him a big boost. For him, he says some of the best ways to learn a language are music, movies, the internet, and even video games. He started by using English subtitles on Hungarian audio. From there, he did English audio with Hungarian subtitles until he could do English with English subtitles. Then, finally, he could listen to the English audio and understand it without subtitles. He continued to do this and other exercises until he understood English without problems.

Other than English, he also speaks German. He started almost three years ago and would still say that he’s at more of a beginner level. He believes that German was harder to learn than English because objects have pronouns. Because of this, you have to learn if every object is feminine or masculine and how and when to grammatically use pronouns. However, grammar wise, he believes that English is the more difficult language.

We’re so excited to have him here as an exchange student at our school and we hope his experience here is full of fun and memories. Welcome Blaze to Palmerton Area High School!