Intercultural Communication

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 ….. :)