The Best Way to Handle Intercultural Miscommunication
--Looking back
upon my first year in Singapore
S
|
ingapore
is really a beautiful country. The beauty of Singapore is reflected by not only
its clean environment, but also many good characters of Singaporean. Six years
ago when I reached Singapore for the first time, I was isolated by the
traditional Chinese cultures. Those Chinese
traditions were not generally accepted, especially by those non-Chinese race
students. This inevitably led to misunderstandings and unnecessary quarreling. Fortunately, thanks to our local
mentor’s tireless and earnest advices, the misunderstanding did not last long :) The followings are some fragments of my first year’s life in Singapore.
When I came to Victoria School for the first time six years ago,
everything was new and very unusual for me. For the first week I could never
understand what people expected from me. The style of living was absolutely
dissimilar. To be honest, I had never experienced such a hot weather. The
environment of study was also quite different. Instead of studying at school
for a whole day, school was over at 2pm every day. Such a light study schedule
made me really anxious about my O-level performance in 2 years later. I was
confusing what MOE expected from my academic results. Some of my friends even
thought that MOE deliberately allocated such easy study plan for us and would
suspend our scholarship in two years. One of my friends, also from China, seriously complained about the study
schedule and criticized the educational system in Singapore to our mentors. To
our surprise, our mentors did not quarrel with us directly. He told us the
importance of CCAs (Co-curricular activities) and showed us various trophies
achieved by different CCA groups. Unlike China, CCA results were counted in our
O-level results. After his conversation, our argument petered out.
Another barrier is the language problems. Because of lack of
equivalences in vocabulary, it generally produced the difficulties in the
translation. Six years ago when our English skills were quite poor, we even
could not distinguish the formal and informal words and chose the correct tone.
As a result, this led to numerous
misunderstanding in our conservation, especially with some other scholars from
Vietnam and Indian. Once my friend had seriously
quarreled with another scholar, the reason was that he used some sensitive and
offensive words which I could not remember. At that time, he had absolutely no
meaning of offense. He simply did not come up with an appropriate word to express his opinion. Feeling to be discriminated, the
Indian scholar seriously blamed my friend. The quarrel quieted down when our
mentor came and translated our words in a proper way.
Therefore, the best way to handle intercultural misunderstanding is to
consider others before self. The feelings would be completely different when you
see from other’s viewpoint. Last but not least, thank to those who have ever
helped me.
Thank
you.---Mr Ang, Mr Low, Mr Wang, Mr Wong, Mdm Lim, Mdm Wong and ….. :)
