What is the real BARRIER?

I don’t know if that’s too universal, but as a foreign student comes from China, I want to talk a little about my stories here in the U.S. related to language, especially Chinese with English and cross cultural communication based on my own experiences. Everyone knows that most of the time it’s not easy to communicate with foreigners who shares a different mother language. But for me, I indeed have found something interesting in past a few months.

I’m a competitive cyclist for many years so when the first time I came here I focused on find a local team to continue building up my cycling career here in D.C. And it wasn’t hard, I get contact with a local cycling club very soon. So those people, who are in the local club, was the very first group of American friends I’ve ever made outside the campus. It’s always relatively easier to make friends with group of people who share a same interests or goals with you regardless different races and languages isn’t it? And I believe, sports is one another excellent barrier breaker for the different culture as well as languages.

When the first time I told them I come from China, a far eastern country, they were all surprised by my oral English skills. Tom, who was the first American cyclist I’ve ever know well about, he told me this with a big smile: “ Oh Weber, you are doing a very good English” Although frankly I don’t think I did, it was still a big compliment for me and have given me a lot confidence to talk to more people. And it wasn’t take too long for me to figure out chatting with Americans in English is not as hard as I thought. All of them were really nice and easy, wanted to learn more about my story, especially culture and customs in my homeland—China. After a few rides together with them, I would like to think that I’m already mingled with local riders and it wasn’t tough at all.

So after many similar experiences like that, I started thinking and connecting those thoughts with my experiences on campus, especially in the classroom. The real barrier, which we tended to blame on the language, is not like what we thought. As a student who already had some kills of English, the real barrier is culture background and language, on the other side, does’t necessarily played a role. In Chinese culture, people are way more sensitive about making mistakes and being embarrassed. We also had a word to describe it, which is known as do not try push yourself or others to any kind of embarrassing situations. In this case, with the initial sensitive of embarrassment, people sometimes are likely to think too much about “what if…” to avoid possible embarrassment, and the willing of communication is cut over time while they think about this issue—that is the real barrier, at least from my point of view. In fact, some of the Chinese students just like me, are more comfortable and relax to talk in a classroom full of foreigners. In our culture, although I can’t figure out what exactly leads this, it is totally strange and embarrass to communicate with Chinese people in English, some times people may be laughed at by doing that. Also, when a class is made up by a considerable amount of Chinese students, as Chinese, we are more likely to feel uncomfortable while speaking because we all know that everyone is affected by Chinese culture, even some of them don’t want to be. And finally, you considered too much about the culture and couldn't leave it at that. Oops, Chinese culture still take the vantage while you are study in the U.S. 

At the end of the day, some Chinese students may find out that they actually performed really well in a class mainly made up by Americans, on the other hand, really poor in a section mainly made up by Chinese or Asian. For us, as Chinese, I'm afraid culture actually is the one which played a more negative role in our daily student life, but we just automatically ignored it somehow and put all our blame on language--English.