jueves, 24 de febrero de 2011

Relacines Internacionales

Hello, I´m Grecia Arbea, i´m studing languages at the Interamericana, I love my major I think is great, the way we get involved into another culture and so on... I´m not that interested about being a translator, i would like to teach english at first here in México, but my target is to go to another country and to teach spanish there.

I think this blog is a good chance to exchange new ideas and working together.

Nice to meet you everybody!!!!



When cultures collide


It´s a book about cultural diversity, about the simililarities and differences between them and how human being could behave around all this. Nevertheless being optimistic about cultural diversity , mutual understanding, could make cohabit easyer in many different manners. Trying to understand different behavior, trends, sequence and tradition, their religions, taboos, values, aspirations, disappointments and lifestyle  could make wide our knowledge and to get too many  opportunities.
 It mentions that sooner or later we can adapt ourselves  to a life style when we stay for a log time in another country (monkey been as monkey seem).

Concepts & Nations
Part of the superficial public behavior is cultural in origin, and yet we can adopt these manners without prejudice to our own core beliefs. Actions are not difficult to emulate, and even different varieties of speech can be imitated to some extent. We readily accept that cultural diversity is vast and formidable.

Different languages, different worlds
Closer to home

In our world, there are others who are more like us. They have modern civilizations,
political parties, industrial complexes and stocks and shares and fashion, due to their development.

Truth. For some countries truth is all about  honesty, for others there is not absolute truth, and even for some of them truth often occasions dismay and leads to fistfights.

As the globalization of business brings executives more frequently together, there is a growing realization that if we examine concepts and values, we can take almost nothing for granted. The word contract translates easily from language to language, but like truth, it has many interpretations. Members of most cultures see themselves as ethical, but ethics can be turned upside down. How can we see, people from different nationalities could make a variation of the same concept and turning it in a completely different one.

The very term common sense has to be treated carefully, for it is not as common as it seems. Common sense, although basic and unsophisticated, cannot be neutral. It is derived from experience, but experience is culture-bound.

Gossip has negative connotations in the Nordic countries and hardly a good name in the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet gossip proves far more important to us than we would at first admit. It is a vital source of information in business circles in many countries.

Silence can be interpreted in different ways. A silent reaction to a business
proposal would seem negative, some countries find nothing wrong with silence as a response. For some others  silence is not equated with failure to communicate, but is an integral part of social interaction. In others as dissimilar Silence means that you listen and learn; talking a lot merely expresses your cleverness, perhaps egoism and arrogance. Silence protects your individualism and privacy; it also shows respect for the individualism
of others.

Powerful mental blocks

As international trade and scientific and political exchange intensify, there is a growing effort on the part of academics, multinational organizations and even nations and governments to improve communication and dialogue. It is becoming increasingly apparent that in pursuit of this goal it is desirable not only to learn foreign languages on a much wider scale but to show a sympathetic cunderstanding of other peoples’ customs, societies and culture.

There is a good deal of scientific support for the hypothesis that higher levels of
thinking depend on language. Thought can be regarded as internalized language.
Most of us conduct an interior monologue, often accompanied by visual
imagery. The more educated and literate the individual, the more complex and
sophisticated this monologue becomes, and there is no doubt that most of this
goes on “in words,” whether expressed aloud or not.

Humor in business

As world trade becomes increasingly globalized, businesspeople meet their foreign
partners more frequently and consequently feel that they know each other better. It is only natural that when they develop a closer relationship, they begin to converse in a more relaxed manner. A funny incident involving some personal discomfort or embarrassment is a good start; a sly attack on a “common enemy” may soon follow.
Humor during business meetings is not infrequent in most European countries, although it is less common among Latins than with Northern peoples, where it is a valuable tool for breaking the ice. Perhaps among the Spaniards, Portuguese and Italians, there is little ice to break. Their own racy, gossipy, confiding conversation style constitutes in itself a valid humorous element.

However, two nationalities in particular avoid jokes and other forms of humor
during the actual business sessions. Germans find it out of place during negotiations.
Business is serious and should be treated as such, without irrelevant stories
or distractions. If you do not concentrate on the issue, you are not showing respect to your interlocutor. Kidding is, in their eyes, not honest and creates confusion in business discussion. They want to know about price, quality and delivery  dates, with some precision, please.

Cultural Conditioning

Geert Hofstede defined culture as “the collective programming of the mind that
distinguishes the members of one category of people from another.” The key
expression in this definition is collective programming. Although not as sinister as
brainwashing, with its connotations of political coercion, it nevertheless describes
a process to which each one of us has been subjected since birth (some people
would say even before birth, but that is a little deep for me). When parents
returning from the hospital carry their baby over the threshold, they have often
already made one of their first culturally based decisions—where the baby will
sleep.

Parents and teachers obviously give children the best advice they can to prepare
them for successful interactions in their own culture and society, where
good and bad, right and wrong, normal and abnormal are clearly defined. It is
perhaps unfortunate in one sense that each cultural group gives its children a
different set of instructions, each equally valid in their own environment.
As we grow up, these learned national and/or regional concepts become our
core beliefs, which we find almost impossible to discard. We regard others’ beliefs
and habits (Russian, Chinese, Hungarian…) as strange or eccentric, mainly
because they are unlike our own.

Cultural conditioning

Most English people think they are normal and that all others (whom they call
“foreigners”) are abnormal—that is to say, they might be all right, but they really
cannot act and think like the English, because, after all, they are foreign.

Chauvinism

Americans think America is the biggest and the best, the newest and the richest,
and all others are a bit slow, old-fashioned, rather poor and somewhat on the
small side. They can’t call the British foreigners, so they call them limeys.
Spaniards think they are the bravest because they kill bulls, the French think
they are intellectually superior to everybody else, the Japanese are quite sure
they are superior to others, including the French. The Germans admit that they
are not as big as the Americans, as agile as the Japanese, as eloquent as the French
or as smooth as the British, but what really counts in life? Efficiency, punctuality,
Gründlichkeit (“thoroughness”), method, consistency and organization, and who
can match Germans on these counts?
There are few countries in the world where people do not believe, at the bottom
of their hearts, that they are the best, or the most intelligent, or at least normal.
Perhaps in Europe the Italians and the Finns are the most innocent in this
regard, often being willing to criticize themselves before others, yet both still
consider themselves normal.


If people from each culture consider themselves normal, then the corollary is
that they consider everybody else abnormal.

Categorizing cultures


In the early years of the twenty-first century, we have many nation–states
and different cultures, but enduring misunderstandings arise principally when
there is a clash of category rather than nationality.

Let us examine for a moment the number and variety of cultures as they now
stand and consider how classification and adaptation might guide us toward better
understanding.
There are over 200 recognized countries or nation-states in the world, and the
number of cultures is considerably greater because of strong regional variations.
For instance, marked differences in values and behavior are observable in the
north and south of such countries as Italy, France and Germany, while other
states are formed of groups with clearly different historical backgrounds (the
United Kingdom with her Celtic and Saxon components, Fiji with her Polynesians
and Indians, Russia with numerous subcultures such as Tatar, Finnic,
Chechen, etc.).

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