Intercultural Communication And Nonverbal Stereotypes

Having watched the three videos, I realized that there were a myriad of elements from the Six Stumbling Blocks. The six stumbling blocks she stated are assumption of similarities, language differences, nonverbal misinterpretations, tendency to evaluate, stress and culture shock. I believe intercultural communication is as complex and a severe issue as it is now. It is because we are never able to understand what “someone else” is, as Barna mentioned in the article. Although we assume we understand what someone else is thinking, we never know if we actually understand the concept, because there is no way to confirm that. This leads to preconception and stereotypes, and these are what cause another misunderstanding, and it creates this pessimistic

Baseball, there were a lot of nonverbal misinterpretations, culture shocks, and assumption of similarities. Well of course, the nonverbal misinterpretations were all about the manners. The main character who visited Japan, does not know the manners of the Japanese culture. Therefore he tries to imitate what his surrounding people are doing, but fails to imitate it correctly, which leads to bad manners again. I strongly feel that manners are just another type of gestures, because both are nonverbal communication that send a message. And you can see how stern the main character’s face is, when he sees how different the table manners are. This can contribute to the lack of interest for cultures. The main character actually looked hurt when the woman didn’t pour him the sake first, however she only did this as a manner. If I were this main character, I would definitely feel unwelcome, because these Japanese people are assuming that I can fully acknowledge their rituals and cultures without being told. However, a valid confirmation the estimations and the guesses, it is impossible to fully understand these

As you can tell from the videos, without knowing anything at the beginning, it is impossible to understand what other cultures are, but I also felt that it is also impractical to overcome all of these 6 stumbling blocks of intercultural communication. For example, if you don’t assume something, you become anxious and that navigates us to another issue that she mentioned, which was stress. The misinterpretations of nonverbal communication are something that is linked with assumption. All of these issues are big issues that prevent us from communicating fully. However I believe there is something more important to us, for example like how fully interested we are in cultures, how optimistic we are to this subject, how much we realize that there are ubiquitous cultural conflicts to cultures in the world. It is fundamental to revamp and ameliorate the mistaken knowledge that we hold in our minds, and welcome change into the world that we