(OT) Trans-cultural communication isn't easy

[agate]

I'm very upset about the US election results, and one reason is that I'm concerned about how the President-elect is going to get along with representatives of other countries.

It is almost impossibly hard to communicate between cultures, and only someone with some understanding of how to bridge those cultural gaps can be an effective US leader now that the US is a major player on the world stage, IMO.

This article in the BBC News about the Persian art of etiquette is one example of just how difficult ordinary communication can be in a culture that isn't like ours, and even our own culture has many communication pitfalls:

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Parsi might have some thoughts about this.

[Virginia]

Interesting, I think most of us have concerns about him getting along with representative of other countries.

[Cat Dancer]

His English speaking/writing style, his speechmaking, has been parsed, and found to be around the 5th grade level. One has to have a mastery of your native tongue to begin to be comfortable with nuances of other languages. Just another area where he falls way short. Poor translation combined with lack of insight leads to disasterous results.

[agate]

He's handy with the expletives though, as in his statement that he would "bomb the s*** out of ISIS" and other pronouncements.


What seems to have escaped people's attention is that he really wasn't saying anything of substance or much significance, and what he did say he often contradicted very soon afterwards.

And that his vocabulary was that of somebody reading at the 5th grade level.

But this is the really sad part. The literacy level in this country is very low considering the amount of education people have had.

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--"50% of adults cannot read books written at an 8th grade level"

I'm sure this is true. When I was teaching, the college students (the requirement for admission was a high school diploma or GED) often needed remedial courses. Those of us who taught those courses considered ourselves very successful if most of the students in a class moved from a 5th grade reading level to 7th grade by the end of the trimester. That was great progress.

My students who ranged in age from 18 to 85 had been unlucky in their early years when they could have easily picked up language skills but the opportunity wasn't there, and time passed. But many did come a very long way towards better comprehension and writing skills.

I can understand why Trump won. People haven't been paying attention to reading or to understanding what others are saying. With so many people reading at a low level, of course they weren't. And in the last 20-30 years, we in the US have been busy entertaining ourselves with all of the fascinating electronic gadgets we now have. What we haven't been doing is reading or paying much attention to what anyone else is really saying. How much attention gets paid to a text message?