There are over 200 nations and 5,000 cultures over the world. Culture has various features from secular things such as: food, clothes, language to sacred realms such as: values, believes, etc...
Each kind of culture has its own particular features to be recognized.
When kimono is mentioned, most of us will immediately think of Japanese.
When someone mentions the phrase "melting pot", it reminds us of the United States.
When we think about Spain, the first image that cross our minds should be the bullfighting and the sexy flamenco dance in the sweet guitar melody.
It is the distinction in different cultures that makes our planet diversified, lively and colorful. However, it is the difference between cultures that may cause misunderstanding and inefficient communications. Some of them may lead to serious aftermaths.
I remember I read somewhere that a Western professor has been fired because he put his leg on the table during the lecture as in Egypt, people considered it as serious offense.
One example which is very familiar to us is the way how we consume food. As Asian, we get used to using chopsticks and spoons in our meals. In contrast, Westerner use forks and knives most of the times.Therefore, we can see how awkward and difficult our exchange friends are when they first come to NUS and have their meals at some food court where there aren't forks or knives.
We may remember of the difference between the Muslim and non-Muslim as well. If you go to a Muslim or Malay food store and ask them to give you pork, you definitely make a very serious offense to Muslim people. That already happened to one of my friends. He went out with another Muslim friend and suddenly forgot his friend was Muslim. Just by asking his friend to have charsiew rice as the food court was famous for charsiew rice, he made his friend furious as he consider asking such question means disrespect to him. Not until then did my friend realize that he did so wrong an action. He tried to apologize and it really took time for him to obtain the forgiveness.
When I first came to Singapore, I couldn't even understand what people was saying albeit I practiced listening when I was at home by listening to BBC everyday. To be honest, my first impression was wondering why people could communicate in such a non-proper English. My friend told me it was Singlish. In a sentence, the main language is English. However, if the partner didn't understand, Chinese would be used. If the partner didn't understand again, Malay and other dialects would be used. Through months living here, I understood that Singlish was a part of Singaporean multiculturalism. Regardless they are Singaporean Chinese, Singaporean Indian or Singaporean Malay, they use Singlish. Singlish has become a distinctive feature for Singapore.
The world is developing days by days. Globalization is now existing in any corner of this world. Everyone of us gradually becomes a global citizen. We are ambassadors for our nations, our cultures ourselves. Let's expose more to other cultures. Try to understand more and harmonize the other cultures. Keeping our own cultures is important but don't let it be the barrier between us and other cultures.
