Week 2

I had a really good time in the class last week. The game was fun and it made me know how communication is important in learning other cultures. Culture is not innate but it can be learned from our parents, teachers, peers, society, etc. Different cultures have their own characteristics and rules that others may not be familiar with. Sometimes, culture differences create the identity of “we” and “they”. When the other group of people came to visit our group, I could notice that they were so confused of what we were talking about. We kept using our own languages to communicate with people from other group but it didn’t work out so well. It was hard for us to know the rules of other game while we cannot understand each other. It seemed like we were different from each other. We end up used the language – English which we both understand to continue the game! J I think it’s definitely true that the lack of mutual understandable language could be a barrier in communicating with others and learning other cultures. Although we could observe other culture and learn its rules by ourselves, it cannot be learned as fast as we communicate and interact with people in that culture. And I think this could be the reason why this class peers up the students from Macau and the students from the U.S. or Japan in doing group works. By creating a platform for communication among people from different cultures, I believe we could know more about the others’ culture quickly and improve our language skills as well.