Exploring cultural difference is an interesting thing, and you may encounter people and situations that really amuse you.
It seems to most of us (and to me as well) that cultural difference shown in communication is mostly in terms of courtesy. People in one country may find it ok to point at people with thire thumb while this may be offensive in another culture. When people meet each other, Japanese bow and westerners shake their hands. I have been wondering wether there is a set manner for the Chinese people follow while we meet each other. Being a Chinese myself, it is difficult for me to realize our own behavior. Last summer holiday, I met a foreigner in my home country who reminded me how people think of Chinese culture.
My province is just next door to Russia and that's why it is common to see Russian people on a street. One day, while I was taking a walk and watch some squirrels in a park, a blond girl came to me and asked me:" ni chi le ma?( have you eaten)" I was shocked and then deeply amused. She was and exchange student who studies English but was interested in Chinese as well. I explained to her that Chinese people no longer use such greetings. She asked me some other interesting questions like do we eat Jiao Zi very often, why do people like to add a word "Xiao(little)" to their surname and how I think of China's fast development. I suddenly realized that even with so much publications in various kinds of media, misunderstanding still exists. We have been taught to "when in Rome, do as the Romans do", however, the "Romans' way of behave may not be the same as we have learnt.
I remembered that when I was in JC, I suffered a lot in writing essays. The teacher said I did not fully explain me arguments, which I think was clear enough. The teacher said that there are lot of information hidden in my argument that could have been illustrated further. Last time when we had the peer teaching , one of my classmates mentioned that because Chinese is a very resourceful language, Chinese people like to assume that others have caught their hidden information. This is exactly what I have encountered and suffered a lot from.
From then onward, I learned not to assume that people understand you and not to assume that you understand others because that may not be the case. Asking more is a good habit to avoid misunderstanding in inter-cultural communication.
Hi Li Xian,
ReplyDeleteI totally agree that mandarin can be very profound, as we can see from the poems and "chen yu" in the Chinese education system. However, I think it is not all Chinese in general that speak with these deep meanings sentences. For example, the most of the new generation Chinese kids in the Singapore Education System, do not speak mandarin with such profound thoughts, as Singaporean tends to not focusing on mandarin. This may be due to the mindset that Mandarin is just a 2nd language.Thus, we can actually see that Education System do play a part in creating or modifying the cultures in a country, for the new generations.
Chinese is what some people would call a 'high context' culture. A lot of Chinese customs and Chinese language carry a lot more meaning that they appear on the surface. The language is like a soul of the culture. It is possible that the language is becoming less implicit and more explicit as we move toward the future. From my experience, a clear example is with my late grandmother and late great grandmother. They may say something, but actually mean something else, or mean a lot more than what they seem to be conveying. Due to the generation gap (and language barrier) a lot of the meanings are not noticed or understood.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to intercultural communication within a generation - perhaps it is more useful and practical to be more explicit. The cost is the beauty of a language (or culture), which gets lost in translation.