Cross-Cultural Communication

People belong to different cultures that is why their way of perceiving world is different. They learned different things and experienced different aspects of life, which shaped their perception of world and people. (Nisbett: 2015 Introduction). In this chapter things which build European’s and East Asian’s way of thinking will be presented to help to understand the major differences in communication and perception of the surrounding world by both - Europeans and East Asians. This background knowledge is necessary in cross-cultural communication.

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2.1. European perception of world and people

Although psychologists believe in universal character of human way of thinking many specialists from various specializations believes that by thousands

Language origins

It is said that language is the key to mutual understanding because of what language origins should not be omitted while presenting cross cultural communication. Although some languages are grouped together and can be associated as totally different they have some similarities and common roots, what makes them sound very much alike for those who do not speak the language.

However, there are many languages in Europe and each of them are different the European languages can be divided into three families, namely Germanic, Romance and Slavic (Stolz 2013: 188). Although European languages come from three different sources they share many similarities. The example given by Janson (2004: Part IV) in his book is German language has taken some words from Latin to describe and define mathematical terms such as Summe “sum” or Prozent “percent”. Such references many be found even in French which is different from Latin but adaptation of some words is visible even though the pronunciation and spelling many be different from the original. Janson (2004: Part IV) also noticed that such situation as in French and German languages takes place in most of European languages (Janson 2004: Part IV). Another good example presenting similarities between languages such as Spanish Italian French and Portuguese are presented by Fortson (2010: 2). Their dependence is visible even in numbers. For example in Spanish noun which represents “one” is “uno” the same as in Italian language.

The most important Greeks attitude followed by Greeks in their everyday life and philosophy was Sense of Personal Agency. What as it will be presented, was completely opposite to the one of Ancient Chinese believes. The Sense of Personal Agency gave the nation of Greece right to decide about their lives make personal choices, which all lead them to the life free from all constrains ( Nisbett 2015: 20). Such vision is not far from today’s one. On the other side of the world, in East Asian countries, such concept would not be accepted even today. Freedom and Individualism were characteristic terms of Ancient Greek philosophy (Nisbett: 2015: