Causes Of Intercultural Communication

Recently, I read an article on intercultural communication. Furthermore, I watched three videos that demonstrated problems with intercultural communication.Intercultural communication is communication between people from different cultures or countries. After reading the article about intercultural communication by Laray M. Barna, I identified some of the reasons that caused the problems in the video.

The first video was about an American baseball player who was eating lunch with a Japanese family. The man does not know anything about Japanese culture, so he tries to do his best by copying what the Japanese family is doing. For example, by slurping the noodles, However, it turns out to be very sloppy and the Japanese adults look at the

In the video, the man is talking to a woman, and the man talks in English and the woman talks in Italian. Nevertheless, they were able to communicate without much trouble,but after this, the man decides to give the woman flowers. He leaves some flowers in front of her house, but in Italy, that type of flowers is used to display sadness. Hence, when a person who passed by sees the flowers next to a bike lying on the ground, the person assumes that the woman who lived in the house was dead. The man who left the flowers did not imply to make it look like she was dead. He only left the flowers as a gift, not aware of cultural differences. However, in different countries flowers symbolize different things. This is also one of nonverbal misinterpretations. Sending flowers in one culture have a different meaning in others. Consequently, the outcome of the mistake led the foreigner to undergo a bad

Even though he is not used to the Chinese food, he eats it all and drinks all of the soup. It is evident that he did this to show that he was finished. However, the Chinese implied this as a sign that he wanted more. Nonetheless, the man did not know that there was a difference in gestures. This is another problem with nonverbal misinterpretations. Foreign countries have different meanings even if it is the same gestures, and eventually, this led to an uncomfortable experience for the foreigner. Also, in this I thought there was an assumption of similarities. The Chinese people assumed that the foreign person was like them, and served him Chinese food; they treated him like they would treat a Chinese person. That is why they thought that the man wanted another serving when he drank all of his soup, they thought that the gestures meant the same thing anywhere in the world. In addition to this, they did not stop to think otherwise. Thinking that other countries have the same meaning for gestures can trigger