中西方跨文化交际之交友

课程代码8047260 课程名称跨文化交际考试形式课程论文

Comparing How to Handle the Friendship in Chinese and American Culture: A Perspective

of Cross-cultural Communication

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Abstract

Due to the different cultural backgrounds of China and the United States, the way to handle the friendship in the two countries is also different. My paper will explore this question in two aspects from the point view of culture: the definition of friend in the two countries, and the way to handle friendship in the two countries. Understanding those will be good for us to develop and consolidate cross-culture friendship.

__________________________________________________________________________________________ Introduction

Human beings are social animals, which means socializing with others is an inevitable thing, so we may meet some proble ms we can not solve without others’ help and we may meet some exciting things that we can not help ourselves from telling them to others, in a word, we need someone to share our happiness and sorrows. In English there is a saying that a friend in need is a friend indeed, and in Chinese there is also a saying that it is enough to have a confidant in one’s life. F rom the two sentences we know that everyone needs friends no matter where he or she from and what backgrounds he or she has. We can easily find that different people have different friends and the way they deal with friendship is also different because they have different characters, interests, experiences and values, so we can speculate that people from China and America will have some different ways to get along with their friends for they come from different culture backgrounds, China is a traditional eastern country while America is a typical western country. Knowing the details of those different is an important thing for us that we can use it to avoid making mistakes when make friends with Americans,

In what follows, at first, I shall explain the definition of friend in Chinese and American culture. Secondly, I will present the different ways to handle friendship in Chinese and American culture. It including three parts: the attitude towards friend and friendship, the understanding of responsibility between friends, and some key principle while getting along with friends. At last, I will give a conclusion on how to handle friendship in Chinese and American culture.

2. The Definition of Friend in the Two Countries

We meet a lot of people everyday, in school, in the street, at our office, or on buses, but can all these people become our friends? Absolutely, no! Only some of them are called “friend”, and only few of the “friends” are regarded as the person with whom we can talk something personal. Those friends may be our classmates, colleagues, family members, and a person you meet in a cloths shop coincidently. Why? How dose this happen? In my opinion it is a matter of how we define the word “friend”.

In Chinese, there are two me anings of the word “friend”: the first one is someone has a friendship with you; the other one is that the one who your love affair is.（《现代汉语词典》,2005）In Chinese eyes, friendship can be invited into two kinds: one is the "acquaintance", from the working relationship, or neighbors you know; the second is a friend, this “friend” is difference from the word in English, the people Chinese called friends are