Jönköping is blessed with a truly international university. According to their homepage, the university has 2700 international students from 100 different countries. Languages like French are often heard on the campus. For a lot of the foreign students, speaking in English can be challenging. It is a whole new world they are getting into and it requires stepping out of one’s own comfort zone. Some are managing that really well, some have issues with it.
Engelska
There can be a lot of reasons why speaking English is difficult for some people. Some might find it really easy to learn new languages but there is a significant amount of people that have a hard time doing that. They might struggle to memorize vocabulary or grammar. Also, there are languages that are very similar to English and ones that are completely different. It also depends to some extent on the education system in the students’ origin countries. France, for instance, had the second lowest level of English proficiency in Europe, according to the EF English proficiency index of 2024.
All of this, however, can be offset with confidence. When people are willing and daring to speak English, they are gonna improve a lot in an impressively short amount of time. Nowadays, there are a lot of tools to facilitate communication in English, even when one’s own level is not sufficient. A lot of students are using translator apps, especially shortly after their arrival. Once again, however, their own comfort zone is holding many students back from even trying to improve in the language. This not only impacts what language they speak, but who they chose to hang out with.
Komfortzonen
By definition, just as Select Psychology mentions, the comfort zone is the: “ (…) psychological state in which the person feels at ease, secure, and familiar. In your comfort zone, you will feel in control of your environment while experiencing relatively low levels of stress and anxiety. It’s a comfortable space in which you don’t need to do anything new, difficult or scary” (Select Psychology, 2026, p.3). Although it’s biologically natural to look for safety and familiarity, the issue with the comfort zone is that we may not always realize how big of a role it plays in our lives.
Take for instance when people are in a new place. From more than 2,500 thousand people and 100 countries, in theory, it would be statistically rare to find big groups of people from the same parts of the world. However, reality turns out to prove this wrong, as it’s often found, it is very common to find many groups of people from the same country together all the time. Most of the time, this is the comfort zone dictating your behaviour. It’s good to be in those groups because you find some affinity or interests you have in common, but in the bigger picture, the repetition of the pattern could indicate that this is not a coincidence.
Vänner
An article called Similarity Among Friends Serves as a Social Prior: The Assumption That “Birds of a Feather Flock Together” Shapes Social Decisions and Relationship Beliefs points that in social dynamics: “(…) people who are similar (e.g., in terms of demographic characteristics) are more likely to become friends due to both structural factors that constrain whom individuals are likely to encounter (…)” (National Library of Medicine, 2023, p.2). This is useful to explain why we as foreigners may tend to look for friend groups with our same language and behaviour, and Swedes do so too, therefore, we on both sides are comfortable sitting in our comfort zones; we study and live in the same place, just everyone is minding their own business, as it would be hard to find foreign people that are submerged in a fully swedish friend group and it would also be hard to find it the other way around.
It is not like one of the two groups in particular is to blame for that, they just both don’t really need to put an effort into interacting. They can just stay in their comfort zone. Also, Swedish people might rather look for friends they are going to be together with after the studies as well. As internationals are more likely to move back into their home country, they might not be the ideal choice. Lastly, a lot of exchange students are not even at the same kickoff as Swedish students and thus do not even meet a lot of them.
As mentioned before, language is partly fostering the kind of segregation between Swedish and foreign students. The Swedish vocabulary, especially of exchange students often doesn’t surpass ja, nej and tack så mycket. This time, tools like image translation and the high English level of Swedish people make it easy for internationals to stay in the comfort zone of not having to learn Swedish.
The stay in Jönköping has at one point been challenging for everyone. But the ones that thrive the most are those who don’t let the ease of their old life hold them back. So please: don’t hesitate to step out of your comfort zone!
Writer: Writers: Braulio Monforte & Moritz Kieck
