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Key Elements Of Effective Communication
Key Elements Of Effective Communication
How does culture affect personality development
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I was in Ohio when I first came to America as an Chinese exchange student, I live in a little town surrounded by endless corn fields, basically in the middle of nowhere. I went to a small public high school, which has only 2 Chinese students, including me. All of a sudden my world is completely changed, nothing from my old days is left, and I’m totally not ready for that. I got so homesick, I began to miss everything about China, people, food, and of course, language. That’s probably the reason why I was so eager to speak Chinese every time I meet the other Chinese girl. It feels so good to speak your native tongue when you are in a brand new country that you barely know anything about alone by yourself. We talked about everything, but mostly about our memory in China, how ugly our school uniform is, how bad the food in the school cafeteria tasted and how tedious our math class was. I never realized our little conversation can possibly hurt anybody’s feeling. One day I was …show more content…
It was easy to do back then, since there were only 2 people who speak Chinese in the whole school. But after I came to Shoreline, things have changed. A diverse college like Shoreline is so much different from that public high school in Ohio. You can hear Chinese all around the campus, as well as almost all the other languages you can think of. Hearing language you don’t know is the kind of thing that you will meet on a daily basis. I’m surprised by how many people use their native tongue in front of people and how people can jump to their native tongue in the middle of a conversation, even when a foreigner is among them. And what’s more, that foreigner doesn’t seem to be bothered by this at all. The experience here makes me rethink about my attitude toward speaking other languages in front of people. Am I overreacting? Am I making this too big of a deal? Is speaking native tongue in front of people who don’t know it rude or
The first and second year after moving from China to the United States, I was afraid to talk to strangers because my English was not very well. I had to depend on my husband for dealing with my personal business, such as making a doctor’s appointment, calling to the bank, or questioning to DMV officers. Douglass says, “being a slave for life began to bear heavily upon my heart” (62). For myself, being a dependent and helpless adult is a shame. Moreover, I lacked of extra money to go to school to improve my English. Thus, I stayed home all the time to avoid embarrassment of talking to strangers. After a while, I realized that improving English speaking skills are the essential to gain my self-confidence. So, I spent time to read various articles on the internet and watched English dialogues’ videos on YouTube. As a non-English speaking immigrant living in the U.S., I inevitably encountered a series of difficulties to integrate myself into a new
My parents come from China, my mom grew up in Taisan and my dad grew up in Guangdong. Around age twenty, they migrated to San Francisco, California where they met and later got married. A few years later they had my older brother and then me with a seven year age gap. I lived there for about 9 years, then we had moved to Bottineau, North Dakota for a year and after that we moved and have been living in Ohio since then. We’ve prevailed a huge transition from moving to the suburbs from a big city. With my first language being Chinese, because my parents only spoke Chinese, I had to learn English through school. Also the large population of Asians in the area of San Francisco that we lived in spoke little to no English,
Living in the United States as a Korean-American was not an easy task growing up. Sure I knew how to read and write English, but I did not know how to read, speak, and write my native language. It was difficult for me emotionally because I felt other people looked down on me especially Korean adults who often asked me why I did not know how to speak Korean in which I had no direct answer. "You should know how to at least speak Korean," they commonly spoke in a friendly tone, trying not to hurt my feelings. In my seventh grade year, I had the urge to take a step in order for me to fit in with the rest of my fellow peers, the Korean sub communities, and feel better about myself.
So I went to Las Vegas with my toddler Spanish and came back a boy! There was not many Spanish speaking people when I went. I was a bit of a creeper listening to random conversations wearing my cheap sunglasses. I would try my best to find the verb, subject, and object they were talking about. Basic words like sed, hambre, mira, mi, tu were common. Sometimes I would recognize the verb but could not figure out the verb ending kind of like trabajarldfkjsdpsb. I was asked a few times if I spoke Spanish and I always replied with “Hablo un poco”. They would then send a flurry of words in my direction as I stood hopeless trying to understand. Occationally I would muster up the courage to order in Spanish or to say anything in Espanol. It was incredibly
Being an American born Chinese doesn’t have its perks. I struggled to make friends because of being Chinese and being one of the only Asian people in a class. There was never a diverse community for me, in classes you're either one race or the other and that's how it went up until now.
So it was December 22 and I was getting ready to get out of Ohio and go to New Jersey. I woke up at 3:30 am to get ready. We stayed in New Jersey for 1 week. Then my dad woke up at 4:30 am and I was so mad at him because he to me the day before to wake up early so that we can get there much faster and I did but he didn’t. So then when we got in the car I was ready so then my friend to me to do at live.ly and then I did and my friend was commenting a lot and it was funny because my friend put a dab god in the middle of my live.ly but it was helpful. Later then when we got to west virginia we went to washington d.c and it was so fun we pass the white house and we went under at mountain there to it was sooooo cool and then I fell asleep for like 4 hours and then I got back up and we were halfway there because we still had 3 hours so then I did musically and then I got bored so then I watch a movie.
Being raised in a Chinese family in the Dominican Republic, I had to go through some hardships. I was constantly being influenced by the Dominican culture, while also being taught Chinese culture at home. These two cultures had different beliefs and traditions, making them difficult to coexist with one another. The difference in culture has made me feel inferior to the people around me because there were so many Dominicans and very little Asians. Feeling inferior, I wanted to follow their tradition and culture so it would make me feel like one of them and not an outcast. Sometimes I would wish I was born Dominican, so I can fit in. I remember wearing traditional Chinese dresses with flower patterns to school, and all of my classmates made fun of me. By the time I grew older my parents did not spend much time at home and as the oldest I had to take over my parents' role and at school.
Michigan I - My interest in this seminar stems from my home, Chicago. As I live in the city of meat packaging and cultural mixing, I found interest in seeing how another city take on its evolution in different way than Chicago. Also in looking at Detroit, I am able to see my city in a different light.
Cleveland, Ohio was a death trap. There were many murders, robberies, and bad crimes. Then I saw the garden. People got along, and they all had something in common besides where they lived. I came to the garden the anniversary of the second year it started. It turned out that people in this city weren’t so bad after all. People were talking to other races, and that is very unusual. I decided I wanted to be apart of this garden. I wanted to plant pink roses. Before my mother passed away, I bought her the prettiest “get well soon” pink roses. She said that those were her favorite flowers, and they were beautiful just like me. She told me she loved them and that she loved me. I wanted to plant pink roses for her.
I was terrified and isolated, since I was concerned of my English skill that I wouldn’t able to communicate to others and make friends, and I didn’t know anyone in my school. I endured the difficulties, after I challenged myself to speak up. I began to make several friends from different countries and enjoy the school life of America. I didn’t have any trouble to fuse into the American culture because I had experienced in different countries’ culture. My family used to move around from countries to countries. Before we settled down in Hong Kong, we had lived in Japan and America for one to two years. Although English was still my biggest concern, the experience of living in different countries provided me the passion to challenge and learn a new language. I was in ELD in my first year of school. Since the class didn’t provide sufficient resources to teach the students learning English and my parents is not an English speaker, I learnt English by myself most of the time and got help from my friends and the people around me. After two years of struggle, I got into the normal English class, eventually. I was proud of my accomplishment in working hard to learn a new
The past two years I have taken Mandarin Chinese through my school. However, the reason that I am passionate about excelling in my understanding of the Chines language is because at my school I live in a house with twelve Chinese girls and one Vietnamese girl. My parents work in another country but, instead of having me live there during my time in high school, they sent me to a school with a boarding program. After bonding with the girls in my house and countless other Chinese students, I not only want to become fluent for the advantages that it will give me but, also because I desperately want to be able to communicate with them in a greater way by learning their language and not simply forcing them to learn
My peers would learn that after moving from California when I was four, I really had been living in China for the past 10 years. As I could only speak a few words of Mandarin at first when I moved to a bilingual school, I had to teach myself how to be comfortable in new situations where I didn’t know any of the language, people or culture. During this time I realized how to communicate effectively with others on my own, and it also meant I was able engage and connect with people from other cultures. This is epitomized in my experiences from my next school, Western Academy of Beijing (WAB). When I first moved there, I walked up to a Korean girl, and I was easily able to connect with her, talking about Korean sushi and how my first day was going.
This growing community is also prone to many challenges. One of the biggest challenges they have is language barrier. As compared to other communities, Most of the Chinese people cannot speak Chinese. in order to know the reason I asked this question to many Chinese people. Chung, 28 years old, a grocery store worker said “In china we don’t have English language education except some big institutes. We prefer our own language in our country and people also don’t like to learn English. Because of this, when we come here, we face many problem regarding communication.”
At this case, possessing a capability of multilingualism is, in fact, forms a bond between people. Speaking with a foreigner in a language that is not native to the listener sounds illogical. It was reminding me of my grandma’s story of the necessity to learn foreign language. My grandma’s husband, or my grandpa, was an air force that always moved from one place to another during his duty and my grandma accompanied him also. One day, my grandma went shopping in her new environment (in Solo, Middle Java) yet she had no idea about the language in that place. The vendor asked “where she come from?” yet my grandma replied it wrong and thus my grandma began to learn the Basa Jawa (Javanese). Hearing grandma’s story, I learned something: learning foreign language means having a new friend, befriend with more
My friend trained me several skills to prevent misunderstanding the culture different and to gain indirect experiences before I actually arrived in that country. As she understood the culture different, she wanted to show me the different between people from another world. Then she taught the language to enhance me with some little skills how to impress or communicate with those people. As well as she reminded me the different of greeting from those culture and American culture. Some of them did not like handshake, hugging or kissing; they simply said “hello” in their language. In addition, that special person reminded me that another Asian people nook their head up and down when they disagree and shake their head to left and right when they agree. This friend enjoys to help and train me as she never thinks that helping her friend to learn something different or new will waste her time. She does her best to help me as she wants it too. Because she wants me to be a better thinker, then I will not be disappointed with people who are different. If she is not there for me, I can apply those training skills to help myself. This friend usually wants her friend to learn in a right