what the .......... ????

Hallo, bonjour, ciao, olá, привет and hola. All of these mean the same thing and accompanied by the same hand gesture or body language, it doesn’t matter if we don’t know the language we would still be able to understand the message.

Have we ever felt like we made a mistake when we can simply not understand what other people say or so frustrated because we cant understand a menu?

Language represents a lot of barriers when we are foreign and non-talker and people who travel abroad encounter this a lot.

Does this means that depending on the number of languages there is a direct relation with the number of language barriers? Sometimes is assumed that when more than one language exists in a place, there must be multiple language barriers. Multilingual societies have traditions of its members learning more than one language, an adaptation which while not entirely removing barriers of understanding relies on the notion of impassable language barriers.

Now, language barriers also occur netween people that speak the same language, this is more of an cultural/slang/society/level/education status of the participants. we will have moments of misunderstanding because of cultural differences that assign different words to different things or assign different meaning to similar phrases.

For example, I arrived to Berlin, and to tell the taxi driver where I was going, it didn’t matter if my bodylanguage was amazing, he just couldn’t decode what I was saying and I couldn’t decode what he was saying to me. This is where I find it very useful to have a blackberry (smartphone) and I was able to pull out my email and show him the address where I needed to be dropped off.

Now, what happens when you are communicating with colleagues in your second language? I do not speak German and they do not speak Spanish. But, we talk English ! eventhen, our English isn’t perfect, we still need to communicate each other, and it has been very interesting how we have to put together a theatrical play (in a way) to show the intention of our message to each other. It is interesting to see how Germans, being the way they are, also use hands and gestures very freely when talking; when they are not known for being like that but they project a very serious distance keeping person.

So, to conclude, I had found it very interesting how to deal with kind of barriers, in a way I like that this difficulties happen because it is actually I way to learn about the host culture and that makes me a bit more culturally competent.

Hugs,

Wally