My Challenges in Verbal and Non-Verbal Intercultural Communication

My Challenges in Verbal and Non-verbal Intercultural Communication
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My Challenges in Verbal and Non-verbal Intercultural Communication
Communication is integral in our daily lives as it allows us to express our ideas, emotions, and feelings. It is through communication, both verbal and non-verbal that we also get to understand and relate well with other people. Given the significance of communication in helping us get around our daily routines, as inability to understand others and not being able to be understood by others can be exasperating. We experience significant challenges when communicating with individuals from a different culture and they can be a source of despair, particularly when there is nothing you can do about at that moment. The significant challenges I have experienced in verbal and non-verbal intercultural communication relate to styles of communicating, approaches to completing tasks, tendency to evaluate, and fear of losing identity, which makes it hard interact and relates well with others.
Different styles of communication are one of the major challenges I have experienced in intercultural communication. While people may have different communication styles that affect communication with one another, the problem is worse when the parties come from completely different cultural backgrounds, say China and the USA. According to DuPraw and Axner (1997), there is a great variation in the way people communicate within and between cultures. The way words and phrases are used within a culture can be completely different from the way they are used in another. In an article by Singh and Rampersad (2010), they note that gestures, customs, body language, signs, and language vary across different cultures. In the past, Ihad found it hard to understand the sarcasm, humor, and slang as used by Americans. When you learn the English language, you do not get to examine in detail these important aspects that characterize language use. The use of language by different people involves different levels of assertiveness and aggressiveness, which vary across cultures. It can be problematic when the communication style of a person you are interacting with is different from yours. The gap in communication style is widerif the person hails from a different cultural background. Therefore, different styles of communication are a key challenge I face in intercultural communication.
Another major challenge I experience relates to approaches to task completion. People handle and complete tasks differently across cultures. Some of the reasons for this according to DuPraw and Axner (1997) include different perceptions of building relationships, different concept of time, and diverging opinion of rewards for completion of assignments. Of these reasons, I relate most with varying ideas about relationship building. In my culture, relationship building is valued,and it characterizes most aspects of life, one of them being meetings. This is consistent with the article by DuPraw and Axner (1997), where the authors note that Hispanic and Asian cultures tend to place value on developing relationships at the onset of a shared project. The same cannot be said of Americans as they focus on tasks from the onse...