When you’re trying to get a message across, especially when communicating with someone from a different culture, context and nuance matter. By “different culture,” I mean any demographic difference, such as age, gender, geographic origin, or work experience, in addition to language, nationality, or ethnicity.
I recently participated in a training course on diplomacy where the moderator asked whether it’s more challenging for a diplomat to communicate with people who speak a different language, or with those who speak the same language. After listening to the students struggle with a response — all relating to the difficulty in communicating across language barriers — I raised my hand. My response was that it is often much harder to communicate when you speak the same language as your listener, because you make an assumption that the person speaking the same language as you has the same thoughts or point of view — an assumption that is almost always wrong.
For example, as someone who grew up in the US in the 1950s (and part of the late 1940s), I use words in a completely different way than those who grew up in the 80s and 90s. On top of that, I spent 20 years in the military (1962 to 1982), so I have a whole other vocabulary, and youngsters in my classrooms today often look at me blankly when I lecture.
Context and nuance make all the difference, regardless of the demographic difference. Different cultural groups have different contextual frameworks and nuances of style that shape their communication. My wife is a good example. She’s five years my junior and was born and grew up in South Korea. She moved to the US with me when she was 25, so her cultural mindset was pretty much fixed. What that means is that she’s from a culture that has specific terms for almost everything, whereas my rural Texas upbringing gave me a whole other set of terms and mental concepts. Even after over 50 years of marriage, and the ability to speak each other’s native languages, we run into some humorous communication barriers. An example: recently, just as we were heading out for our daily three-mile walk, she asked me if I’d remembered to ‘open the garage door.’ I wasn’t concentrating, so I asked her, “Why would I want to do that?” “So we can get back into the house from the garage,” she said, not amused at my totally incorrect response.
Of course, by that point, I’d caught my error. To me, a garage door is the door ‘into’ the garage, and the door from the garage into the house is just that. To her, any door attached to the garage, regardless of its position, is a garage door. We always leave the door in from the garage unlocked (to her, opening and unlocking are not different, whereas to me they are). So, the meaning of her question was “did you remember to unlock the door in from the garage?”
Unspoken, because it wasn’t needed, was, ‘so we can get into the house when we finish our walk.” Had I been paying attention, I would’ve known that and answered, “yes,” and been done with it.
No matter who you are, or where you live, this kind of communication problem is always possible, and it can only be avoided — or at least minimized — by learning to listen accurately, actively, and carefully, and realizing that just because you recognize the words, it doesn’t mean you know what they mean unless you truly understand the person using them. | NWI
