Singapore
here I am, I had to go a long way to study a semester abroad, a dream that
became a reality on August 1st, the day that I arrive to Singapore and NUS
particular, thereby a new life started: another country with many different
cultures, foods, styles life, but the most spectacular, with several language…
After the first hours in Singapore in my mind I thought: "Wow it’s so cool
that here are many culture and everyone with their own language…but wait a
minute, I don’t speak Chinese, neither Hindi, neither Malay…I’m in
troubles!!!". However I was very impress when I heard and saw how all of
this people could communicate them.
However
with the pass of the days I saw that no everyone could communicate effectively,
even I couldn't express some ideas in the correct way. Therefore I believe that
effective communication it's essential in every part of the world at any time
because we can communicate not only with verbal forms but also with the no verbal
forms (facial expressions, gestures, body language, …)
Thus,
effective communication skills are also important for me in many ways: like an
exchange student because if I want to express one idea or just have a simple
conversation I need chose the correctly words and also do the right gestures;
like an aspiring engineer, I need to be constantly aware of what I say, what I
think, of what I write, since an error for any misunderstanding can be catastrophic
for a design, a calculation, or a project.
With this I am not saying I want to be perfect, but at least I have the notion of what I am doing.
Welcome to Singapore Juan, hope you have an enjoyable semester here!
ReplyDeleteYes indeed, Singapore is a melting pot of different cultures and languages. Despite living here for over 22 years, it still never fails to amaze me how so many diverse groups of people can co harmoniously interact and live together.
But it wasn’t always so, in the beginning when Sir Stanford Raffles first came to Singapore, people of different races lived quite separate lives. One reason for that was the disability to communicate. The Chinese population then spoke in their own dialects, the Malays spoke Melayu and the Indians spoke Tamil and Hindi. Even within the Chinese population the people were dispersed and they grouped in their various cantonments according to the dialects they spoke, namely the Hokkiens, Cantonese, etc.
That was why in the early days the bilingualism policy of Singapore was birth, making English the common denominator amongst the populace to encourage greater communication and interaction across all races and culture.
Today I can say most Singaporeans are able to communicate and understand each other but to what extent and how effective, would be another question to behold altogether.
Thank you very much for your words of welcome "Yechuan" I also look forward to a great semester here, but to tell the truth I'm still in the process of adapting to the way in studying here.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about that not all people in Singapore do not have an effective communication, however, do not believe all this problem is cause by the mix of culture, if not to the lack of development of communication skills, in other words, for lack of study.
So I think that for any country, job or human interaction, it is necessary to develop communication skills that allow us to have better communication (sending and receiving the message). At the same time I believe that if we as youth can set an example of how we communicate in a better way, I think we can impact a portion of the population.
Begin to develop further our communication skills to achieve effective communication.
Hi Juan do take this opportunity to get to know as many people from different cultures as possible. It will be a really good learning experience for you. To do this try and sit in different parts of the room and group with different students each time. It should be quite interesting for you.
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