Culture: Barriers to Intercultural Communication - Essay Example

Culture: Barriers to Intercultural Communication My selections from the list of barriers to intercultural communication are linguistic, cultural, non-verbal and emotional.I think Im a good example of this cultural environment. I come from a Middle Eastern background, and Im married to a Chinese girl. We have been together more than three years, and we have been experiencing the intercultural communication barriers almost every day in our life.For the linguistic, its complicated. I can speak a little of Chinese while she also can speak a little of Arabic, and we use English as our main language.

Both of us are not native English speakers. Sometimes when we cant express our needs or feelings we try to use all the languages we can speak to send the right message due to lack of vocabulary. I faced a cultural barrier when I had to meet my wife family. I had to ask her for each step that I had to do to avoid any slips. Hence. I had to follow some traditions on who speaks first, ways of treating old people, food culture, and visiting relatives.Nonverbal communication in china has some similarity with my background.

In China, you cant use hand gestures, its very rude to point someone directly, and cant start to shake hands with the opposite sex.The last thing is the Emotional part. you might say something that will hurt somebody and might see something that will shock you. Hence, ‘Thinking you know more than others you will certainly have this feeling and thoughts when you live in an environment different than yours. I have heard this sentence many times, sometimes you will think that you are smarter than others and vice versa.