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The Joy Club

In this video, it shows that to learn one’s culture is important when we get to know someone whether they are our friend or lover. In the video, it shows that Rich should have learn at least basic culture from Waverly before he decided to meet Waverly’s parents and embarrassed himself like that. There are few things that should be taken for example the do’s and don’ts while trying to get into Waverly’s family

Do's
1) Should have taken small spoonful for the best dishes
2) Should have ask opinion from others if it's share together

Don'ts
1) Should not taking second glass when everyone else is having their first glass
2) Should not criticize someone else cooking

But this is like to me a basic in Asian family, it is just that since Rich has grown up in different culture which is very different to Asian, hence the bringing is a bit different.

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Intercultural communication is a way of people who have different cultural to communicate among each other. As for my own experience, since I do have friends from different culture, be it in the Malaysia or outside from Malaysia, it is important to understand and accepted what their culture about and respect about it. As shared by Pellegrino Riccardi in the Ted-Talk video, he has shown few examples how different people coming from different culture. As we know, Malaysia has various of cultures since we have various of races. According to Abba (2015), people cannot not learn the culture without going through communication which is true to me. Different culture brings a lot of differences and only through communication it will help more people who are curious about these differences to learn all these differences. For example, even I am curious about how other races than Malay usually has their wedding, their celebrations, their funeral, many more things and only through communication I can get the answer of all these questions I have in my mind. It is important to know all these differences could have bring values in our own life and we take it as a lesson or even could apply it to our daily life which are the best culture for our own.

Reference

Issa, A. A., Ali-Garga, F. Z., & Yunusa, M. (2015, June 13). The meaning and theories of intercultural communication. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309155695_The_Meaning_and_Theories_of_Intercultural_Communication

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Previous week we talk about how intercultural communication would connect people. In this week, we will talk about how intercultural communication have relation to the global society. So, we know that intercultural communication happens when the two people coming from different cultural perception interacts. When intercultural connected to global community, it would have impacted few things such as international conflict, natural resources, jobs, environmental challenges, healthcare issues, and even population shifts. As much as intercultural communication impacted our life, there are challenges too such as individual uniqueness, generalization and objectivity. As for example, being a Malay myself, I would find it is unique that most Chinese are prefer to use chopstick when they are eating while Malay prefer to use their hands when they are eating and that just shows people are shaped by multiple sources.

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For this week, we will talk about how communication and culture connecting people around the globe. There are few uses of communication which are to help fulfil interpersonal needs, assists with person perception, establishes cultural and personal identities and even has persuasive qualities. There are few components human communication which are dynamic process, symbolic, contextual, self-reflect, irreversible, has consequences and complex. Even so, communication do have misconceptions where people would always think that communication can solve any problem, some people are naturally born with effective communication and whatever message you want to send is the message the other person will received. As for my experience, I would say my job really need to communicate well with other people this is because my job is indirectly direct to operation. It is important to make sure all messages deliver well to the other people so there should not be miscommunication and misinterpretation for the message. And through communication, we can only know about other people’s culture. There are many cultures in this globe, and languages to learn and without communicating, then the culture and languages could never be learnt. As for myself, since I enjoyed listened to Korean songs and Korean dramas, I did self-learn for the Korean language. I may not be professional at the language since I am still learning but at least I can understand a little bit of their languages, and their culture.

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For this week, we learnt about family which have nuclear family, extended family and alternative family. Nuclear family usually includes parents and children meanwhile extended family includes grandparents and relatives. It can be said the family can teach many communication skills which include introduces people to language and tells people how to employ language. There are also cultural variants in family interaction social skills which are communicating skills, aggressive behaviour and decision making. For communicating, it is also includes starting and stopping a conversation, turn taking, know when not to interrupt, using silence, appropriate topics of conversation, using humor and use of nonverbal communication. For aggressive behaviour usually have negative connotation in Asian family where usually it will be avoided, meanwhile if it is in the North America family, mostly parents will encourage the aggressive behaviour. Furthermore, communication also teach on how to make decision and how to make conclusion. We also learnt about the idiosyncrasy where it meant a strange behaviour or unusual habit someone or something has, it can be in someone’s habit or the family itself. As for my family, I would say my family are communicating well where we know we cannot interrupt when older people are talking, taking turn when to talk because basically all of us will talk unstoppably. It can be said that my family is that typical Asian family where we know where to start and when to stop especially when we talk among our family members.

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For this week, we learnt about the perception, beliefs, values and behaviours. in this week, we also learnt about Hofstede’s value dimension which are individualism or collectivism, Uncertainty avoidance, power distance, masculinity or femininity and lastly, long- and short-term orientation. In the Hofstede’s individualism usually focused on the individual and self-promotion, independency, task dominates relationship and social obedience through sense of guilty. Meanwhile, for collectivism usually focused on the group or affiliation and self-criticism, interdependency and lasty social obedience through sense of shame. There is also uncertainty avoidance where one does not know the situation until feel threaten. Power distance concerned about the societies manage the fact that people are unequal. According to Hofstede’s masculinity and femininity is the degree to which masculine and feminine traits are valued and revealed.

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Culture and Identity: Situating the Individual.

Identity is not a single entity. But rather it is a combination of multiple integrated identities that operate in combination based on the social context or situation. There are three identities which are human, social and personal. Human identities are the perception of one self that link one to the humanity and separate from the other life, social identities are represented by the group that one included such as racial, ethnic, occupational. Personal identity is what sets one apart from other in-group members and marks one as unique. Identities may start from the childhood and progressing through adolescence into the adult years. Identity can be acquired through interaction with another member of one’s cultural group. Identity is what brought us to the people we may know or may not know. As for me, even if I say that I do not have any differences or changes in identity, it gets better around the people who know me.

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For this week we have learn stereotyping and prejudice. Stereotyping is a natural and often subconscious way of dealing with unknown situations. It is a complex form of categorization that mentally organizes experiences and guide behaviour toward particular group of people. It can be assumed whether positive or negative. There are two ways to control stereotyping which is inflexible stereotyping and flexible stereotyping.  Prejudice are learned and fulfil a variety functions for the people who are holding them. There are four functions of prejudice

1 – The ego-defensive which allows individuals to hold a prejudice while denying themselves that they posse negative beliefs about a group

2 – The utilitarian function where enables people to believe that their prejudicial beliefs result in a positive outcome.

3 – A value-expressive occurs when people maintain a prejudice in the belief that their attitude represent the highest moral values of the culture

4 – Knowledge function, people can categorize, organize and construct their perceptions of other people in matter where can consider rational, even if the perception is wrong.

For example, based on my experience, people always have stereotype that Muslim women are hard to approach when it is actually not. It is just, sometimes Muslim women are just too shy to make a move or talking first. For prejudice, there are some saying that people who has the ability to speak in Mandarin, may have slightly higher salary compared who do not have the ability to speak Mandarin. This kind of prejudice may not seen obviously but it may happen somewhere we did not know.

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Verbal messages: exchanging ideas through language.

Just like the title, the functions of language are to make social interaction, social cohesion and expression of identity. But what is language? Language may be thought as an organized symbol, both verbal and nonverbal, used in a common and uniform way by persons who are able to manipulate these symbols to express their thoughts and feelings. The characteristics of language are that words are only symbol, words are arbitrary, and words evoke denotative or connotative meanings. Language allows people to exchange information and abstract ideas. There are variations within language groups such as accents, dialects, argot and slang. Language can be learnt and transmitted easily. For example, back then during my study in UMK Pengkalan Chepa, I have roommate where two of my roommates are from Kedah and one from Penang. Instead of I learnt the Kelantanese slang, I speaks Kedah and Penang slang. Other than that, since I am a fan of Korean songs, dramas and variety shows I learnt the language by myself. As for now, I can read the Hangul characters and understand a little bit.

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Nonverbal Communicaion: The Message of Action, Space, Time and Silence.

Nonverbal stimuli in a communication setting that are generated by both the source and their use of the environment and that have potential message value for the source and/or receiver. Nonverbal message may be intentional or unintentional. It can work alone or in tandem with verbal messages. It should always be remembered that nonverbal message involve multichannel activity, can be ambiguous and are composed of numerous interacting variables. There are six classification of nonverbal communication which is message of the body, appearance, body movement, space and distance, time and lastly silence. We may take example mute person who may have use signal language to communicate. They are using their hand movements, to communicate with other people.