The course “Intercultural Communication” helps me widen my knowledge of the human communication among different cultures. During the course, I learnt many interesting things related to the relationship of culture and communication. This relationship is very complicated because each country has the different style of communication focus on their culture and the function of communication in every country is also different. Thus, there are a lot of barriers and difficulties in communication caused by differences in values across cultures. According to Cheng and Starosta (2015), “Human communication is a holistic system by which people develop and maintain harmonious relationships in a continuous transforming process of mutual dependency. This model of communication, which is clearly embedded in Eastern thought, [...] is essentially different from common Western approaches because it holds harmony as the end rather than the means of human communication.” This is the overview assessment of the differences in communication between Eastern and Western. In this essay, I want to show my limited understanding of these differences in the context of Vietnam and the countries in Western.
First of all, based on the book “Communicating with Vietnamese in Intercultural Context: Insights into Vietnamese value” of Doctor Pham Thi Hong Nhung, I know that the Vietnamese tend to concern for their Face, Equity Rights and Association Right when they communicate with the Western. In the Vietnamese