Communication Across Cultures

Nowadays everything is connected. We have the internet which makes it very easy for people to communicate with each other all over the world, and across countries. Yet there is a lot of war going on caused by the lack of communication and understanding. Even though our planet is global, people still lack understanding and accept of other cultures. Most of us can speak English and communicate with almost the entire world but our values and cultures are still very different.

There are many ways of communicating. It starts the moment we are born. We cry for attention and we get it that way. This behaviour is achieved through years of reinforcement and when we get a little older we discover that the louder we cry, the more attention we get. The crying soon evolves to language and we start communicating with words. Body language is also an important factor in communication. Communication strengthens our relations and without it we would be alone. The only problem is that we talk different languages, in different countries and somewhere even in the same country, therefore it is hard for us to understand each other because we need to start learning these different languages from the scratch. A language takes up a lot of time to learn and there are so many of them in the world.. Therefore people have found a “common” language, English. Most of us learn English in school when we are you, so we can communicate across borders. Some learn French as their second language and some are too poor to get an education.