The Misunderstandings In Intercultural Communication

The world today is characterized by ever increasing number of contact due to the result of globalization. And therefore resulting in more intercultural communication as people are more connected nowadays. With more and more culture and language mixing it is inevitable that some misunderstand might occur. And that can be a problem when there is at least 50 different languages from all around the world and some are similar yet different at the same time. And with that said I believe I have a story where my family and I have visited Indonesia and didn’t manage to get the correct information about some unspoken rules that are not common in my country or certain words are deem rude when used in a particular way as the language difference isn’t too noticeable until we are there to experience it ourselves there first hand.

A few years back when my family and I visited Indonesia for vacation, I always thought that both Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia is similar in terms of speaking and writing, therefore it should be easy to communicate. But little did I know that the language have quite a minor but undetectable difference for some words. When I first arrived to the airport, everything is in English. But the moment me and my family step outside and started to look for the person responsible to ferry us from the airport to our hotel. After I found the person responsible to ferry me and my family to our hotel, I called the person out. But because I used a slightly different word the person told me that I can call him “pak” instead of “encik” as it is more polite to address older people with “pak”. And because of that I feel that I should be more careful with the word I use. Fast forward to the dinner time, when we are supposed have dinner at a restaurant, we decided that we wanted to eat there. But there is a catch. We didn’t know that we are supposed to remove the shoes and the shopkeeper keep telling us to remove our shoes but we don’t really understand what he is trying to say as, so when we stepped in we realized we are the only ones with shoes on and we quickly went outside to remove our shoes. Before we visited we thought maybe the culture difference isn’t that great. But we didn’t do enough research to other’s culture we were told off to another place as the owner isn’t willing to have us as customer. Thing gone horribly wrong as we didn’t meant to offend anybody. So we apologize and oblige to leave the place in search of another. If we have continued to dine in there, we will be stared at or being gossiped at as we made a very embarrassing mistake.

If we have done a little more research to the culture of the places we were to visit, such misunderstanding can be avoided. And we wouldn’t have to be leaving the place in embarrassment. But things happened so we have no choice but to leave. And after having a dinner at another place, we start to do some research to the culture of the place we visited. But to our surprise, we have made a mistake by crossing the line of some unspoken rules. And we tried to list down everything we read online to make sure we didn’t make the same mistake again. And sure enough on the 2nd day of our trip we followed what we read online and we didn’t offend anybody in the area that we have visited, this shows that if more research have been done before we visited the place, we would have avoided such embarrassing incident on the first night we spend there. So as a way to say sorry to the first restaurant owner, we decided to went back and dine at the restaurant again, trying to understand the culture by dining and having chat with the owner to really know the unspoken rule over there even more clearer. And at the end of the dining experience we have cleared out our misunderstanding and we can happily enjoy a meal there knowing we wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

In conclusion, if we have done more research into the unspoken rule of the place, we might be safe from the embarrassment we experience the first night we are there. And we will definitely do a more throughout research on the place we wanted to visit in the future to avoid being scolded or being asked to leave when it is our mistake.