At home and in class, we have watched 3 videos related to intercultural communication problems that can happen in real-life. We also read about Barna’s Stumbling Blocks in Intercultural Communication which is deeply related to the videos. The first video on the baseball player eating with a Japanese coach’s family had many examples of the “stumbling blocks.”
First of all, there is the assumption of similarities from the beginning of the video, which is the first and the longest stumbling block mentioned in the article. The assumption of similarities happens because we are all human with needs of food and shelter makes us into thinking we are all the same. In the first part of the video, every family member slurps Japanese somen with chopsticks.…show more content… Assumption of similarities, as I mentioned before is the assumption that people are all the same because of biological needs and not consider things can be different in another culture. The assumption in this video was that the English man thought it would be nice to give Sofia, the Italian woman flowers and brought them to her house as a gift. Though in Italy, the flowers he brought were the kind of flowers used for funerals and sadness which led to misunderstanding that Sofia has died, when he only wanted to give her flowers. Tendency to evaluate here is that the Italian woman who found the flowers in front of Sofia’s house immediately thought Sofia died because of the flowers without listening to the English man. That causes so much misunderstanding between the two…show more content… Even if people do not mean to be doing anything wrong, misunderstanding can happen anytime in a different point of view. That is the reason why we all need to start understanding diverse cultures and that there are different meanings in different cultures. We need to research about diverse cultures and more importantly, we need to understand that things can be different for other people. To research other cultures, we should be capable of accessing information about diverse cultures and acknowledge the differences. We have to understand that there can be so many circumstances related to cultural differences and