BIODATA

I am Aishath Nishana, a third year undergraduate majoring in chemistry at the National University of Singapore. First of all, describing about my personality, I am a positively-thinking individual in every aspect of life that I face, and this is one of my greatest strengths. One thing that I believe in is the virtue of being silent. I have always believed that “Speech is great; but silence is greater for success”. Being optimistic and silent, I have succeeded in achieving many goals in life. I like to discover things, to think and appreciate the wonders of the nature scientifically and hence I chose chemistry as my career. Regarding my role as a university student, I am proud to say that I have acquired great skills in the Chemical Laboratory field which would help me in achieving my research goals in future. Despite being a science student, I have also acquired knowledge on banking and accounting from my past one year work experience in Bank of Maldives. It was from this experience that I learned to work hard under pressure and gained the ability to work with deadlines. The reason why I have pursued different fields for work experience and my career is to broaden my horizons and gain knowledge in different fields of study. The experience gained through two fields gave me an insight to choose the best career that is suitable for me. Moreover, I am very keen in researching on the chemical compounds related to the human body and drugs. Being a final year student, I hope that my acquired knowledge and skills, as well as my positive attitude, would help me in achieving my research goals which will be beneficial for the better development of our nation...
My areas of interest are web browsing and reading current affairs.In addition,I am very interested in reading things related to religion and culture.I like to meet people from different cultures and to learn theirs cultural style.

"Culture as a barrier for Effective Communication"

It seems clear today that the essence of modern culture is nothing other than communication. Hence in this post I would like to analyze on the barriers of communication. Specifically I wish to elucidate on “Culture as a barrier for effective communication”

Culture is the practice that a group of people adopts in their lifestyle. Culture differentiates the clothing, food habits, the values and the beliefs of different groups of people. There are different cultural groups. The most important is the nation followed by ethnic groups and religious groups, gender, economic back ground and professions. Since there are many groups effective communication with people of different cultures is especially challenging. This is because culture modifies the people’s ways of seeing, hearing and interpreting the world. For example, same words can mean different things to people from different cultures.

Here, I would like to focus deeply on the challenges faced during intercultural communication. The most common challenge faced in intercultural communication is language and the accent. Furthermore, body language or the gestures also differ in different cultures. For example, we could notice that the gestures shown below indicate different meanings in different countries.

Fig1:In America and England this sign means OK, well or good. Where else in Latin America and France it is considered as an insult.

Fig 2: Raising your hand up means stop in America and England. In some Asian countries this gesture is used when asking for permission

Fig 3:Telling someone to come to you by curling your finger is acceptable in America and England. But this gesture is rude in many Asian countries like Singapore as this sign means death.

Culture not only acts as a barrier to oral communication but it has influences on written communication too. For example, the dates are written differently in different countries. Like in most Arabic countries the date’s system is different from the English system. In addition the naming system and also the format of the address writing are also different. Thus we could notice that culture acts as a barrier to both oral and written communication.

I being acknowledged to the above facts, I would like to ask suggestions on how intercultural communication challenges can be rooted out since effective intercultural communication is vital for business and also social development between different cultures.