Reflection Paper

Reflection Paper

Intercultural communication is a useful and unique course, which conduct us a better understanding to different cultures. Whatever areas of culture, whether it’s religion, dietary, ceremony, folklore or any other, intercultural communication taught us to see things through new eyes. It occurs whenever a minimum of two persons from different cultures and countries come together and exchange verbal and nonverbal symbolic . The most important thing I got form it is the perception of cross-culture. Only we own this special realizision , our cross-cultural communication can be successful .because people from different cultural group have different world view, values, and the communication ways.

Montaigue said:”there never were, in the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity (page 75).” This suggested that culture has its own property. It is necessary for us to learn about different kinds of culture, and then develop our perception of cultural communication. For example, the definition of friendship is different. People from different cultural groups have different views. In China, “friend” can be applied to a wide range of relationship-to someone has known for a few weeks in a new place, to a close business associate, to a childhood playmate, to a man or woman, to a trusted confident. There are real differences among these relations for American-a friendship maybe superficial, casual, situational or deep and enduring. But to a European, who sees only our surface behavior, the differences are not clear (page 77).Therefore, we can found that we Chinese pay more attention to friendship and remain faithful to friends. On the contrary, the foreigners’ friendship is not like ours’. I have an American f riend, when we met for the first time, I was really excited and fevered. Because she was my first foreign friend, I want to made good friends with her. So I gave her some books as gift. But to my disappointment, she lost touch with me soon. I didn’t understand at first. Why did she treat me like that? But after I learnt the intercultural communication course, I found the answer: American friendship maybe casual and situational, their friendship values is different from us. The more friendship culture we have, the less conflict and rush could happen when we made friends with them.

Only through intercultural communication can we ever get to know the person as an individual. The language and the culture belong to the social phenomenon, the language, one of social cultural essential factors, which is the cultural carrier. The culture is handed down through language, they have close relationship. The language is used in the certain cultural context, the language use receives cultural the restriction, the differences between languages have reflected the differences of national culture. Because each nationality's geographical position, the historical development, the thinking mode, the habits and customs, the value , the religious belief and so on are different, thus has formed the different cultural standard, namely so-called cultural difference. Like communication, culture is