Effective Intercultural Communication

As an international student, I have experienced a number of intercultural interactions and communications throughout the last three years in Singapore. One experience that I will never forget is when I first went to help on getting my hall’s float done for RAG day presentation which is commonly called as RAG rush.
RAG rush is held in a dining hall where many people are sitting side-by-side. It would feel awkward if you heard of people sitting side-by-side for hours without actually interacting and communicating with each other. But that was what exactly happened to me, I felt a culture shock and felt really hard to communicate with the other students.

The things that hinder me in initiating communications are languages, jargons, accents and level of endurances. In addition to my non-proficiency in speaking English language along with the difference in accents and pronunciations and local jargons lead me to the difficulty of receiving and conveying messages with other students. The people in RAG team has only been sleeping for less than 4 hours every day but they are still very active and energized. Moreover, I was used to normal sleeping hours that staying up above 11pm was very rare to me and working full-day would be too much for me. But most people would come around that time to start helping on finishing the float.

From Wikipedia, culture is a shared system of symbols, beliefs, attitudes, values, expectations, and norms of behaviour. In the example, the culture differences can be seen in the language, sleeping hours and hard-working traits. Culture differences are inevitable and can hinder on communications, but there are workarounds for allowing intercultural effective communications. I summarized these workarounds as share, respect and adapt. Sharing is important as both parties involved in communications might not aware of the differences. After sharing is done, respect, good-will and patient must be possessed by both parties as it is sometimes difficult in overcoming the cultural differences. For example, by asking on the local jargons meaning would help in communicating effectively in the future. Lastly, adaptation must be made by both parties.