国际文化交流 英文

Individual assignment

Case study

Name: Sun Qian

T-number: 890706-T157

Date: 2011-03-24

Introduction:

The world consists of different countries. Every country has its own unique culture. People come from different countries have different belief and different customs. But with the globalization increasing , world is becoming smaller and smaller. Different people from different countries start to mix and live together. So to get better communication with different people, we should respect and understand different cultures. on the first day that I came to Karlstad, everything was new to me. Before I came here, I’ve heard something about the difference between eastern and western, ho wever I’ve never experienced the difference. Now I’ve been here for 2 months, I have classes and live with different countries’ people. During this time, I found sometimes there were some misunderstandings due to the differences between different cultures. I expect to know more about the culture of other countries and the reason why we will misunderstand each other. If I know the reasons we won’t have misunderstandings and we can live a better life together. I think that is why we should learn more about intercultural communication. The following example is one of my experiences from my life. I will analyze this example by using concepts in the field of intercultural communication.

Situation Description:

The second of February is china’s spring festival. To Chinese, it is the most important day of the festivals. On that day, Chinese get together to have the dinner. We sent a invitation on Face book to invite the friends from different countries. On that day 2 Swedes, 1 American, 1 Mexican and 1 Frenchman would surely join us. Also some friends who were invited by us could not decide whether they would come to us or not. All my Chinese female friends made a lot of food in case that someone had nothing to eat. At the noon of the spring festival we started to prepare for the dishes. There were almost 20 Chinese in the kitchen so it was a little crowded.

In the afternoon, the friends began to come. An American girl brought us some flowers while the others brought nothing. They seemed to be interested in the

traditional Chinese food called dumplings. When we were making the dumplings, American Mexican and French friends joined us while the Swedes were just sitting there.

When the dinner started, all the Chinese wound not sit until all the others sat. When the dinner began I found the two Swedes ate very slowly. Although some food should be eaten by hand they still used the folks. The American would choose the food she loved to eat. Even it was far away she would ask someone to help her to get it. And the Chinese would choose the food nearby. After about an hour, some Germans came. They were not the guests we invited and we had no more seats already, but some Chinese gave out their seats. The German are conversable. They talked a lot when eating. Sometimes they would ask us the way to cook the food they were fond of. Furthermore, they even gave us some ideas about how to make the dumplings more suitable for Europeans. It seemed that they are our old friends but actually we didn’t know them before.

After the dinner, some Chinese cleaned the kitchen. The others began to take photos, chat with each other. Some foreign friends and I went to smoke outside. We said happy new year to each other. When we were washing the dishes a Tanzanian helped me. He told me that in his country women would wash the dishes. And I told him in china washing dishes was the thing that was usually done by women .But with the development of the society, more and more women started to have their own enterprise. So the situation was partly changing. Some men started to do the household. Two French friends interrupted us and said”In Europe, Both men and women should do the housework together.” At the same time some German students came up and said to me that they were not satisfied with the environment condition and they wanted to help us to clean the kitchen right now.