Going Dancing on Bikes

The complexities and difficulties of communication are apparent in our daily lives. Whether in writing, on the telephone or in person, everyone has had experiences where they have misunderstood, or have been misunderstood. However, those misunderstandings have the potential of compounding in the course of intercultural communication.

At its foundation, communication occurs when a sender encodes, or creates, a message that is decoded, or interpreted, by a receiver; intercultural communication, then, is when the sender and receiver are from different cultural backgrounds (Moran, et al., 2014). In successful, or effective, communication, the message intended by the sender is accurately interpreted by the receiver, who then responds reciprocally as the communication continues. Occasionally, errors, or noise, occurs that prevent a message from being accurately encoded or decoded, and misunderstandings occur.

One such misunderstanding occurred when I was thirteen years old, and my parents took my two younger sisters and me to Germany for a month. My father had emigrated from Germany when he was twenty-two years old; and although he had returned to visit his parents and siblings on a few subsequent occasions, this was the first trip we took as a family.

My father did not speak German in our home. My year of junior-high level German gave me some basics, but certainly not enough to converse. While my younger sisters learned some German phrases as they played with our younger cousins who had not yet learned English, I was spoiled by teenaged cousins who had at least three years of English in school. They loved practicing their English!

One day I was visiting my cousin, Sonja.

“Do you like to dance?” she asked me.

“Yes!” I replied.

“We have dances, here” she said. Then, immediately, she asked me, “Would you like to go with me tonight on bicycles?”

“Sure!”

Shortly after, I headed back to my aunt’s home and excitedly told everyone I was going to a dance with Sonja. As the time approached, I got dressed in the fanciest dress I had brought with me.   I wasn’t sure how I was going to ride a bike wearing a dress, but if that was how we were getting to the dance, then I’d have to figure it out.

Imagine my surprise when Sonja showed up in jeans and a sweatshirt. We weren’t going to a dance; we were riding bikes! We all laughed, I changed clothes, and we had a nice bike ride around the small town where my father’s family lived.

Even though this story happened over forty years ago, yet I still remember how embarrassed I was that I had misunderstood Sonja’s invitation. I imagine that Sonja likewise felt bad about the mix-up. Sonja’s limited English meant that she spoke in simple sentences that would have likely been more elaborate had she been speaking in German. I interpreted her question based on how I would’ve said it. Would you like to ride bikes with me tonight would have signaled to me that we were going bike riding. Instead, I inserted dancing into her question: would you like to go [dancing] with me tonight on bicycles.

Of course, this is a rather benign example of intercultural communication gone awry. Yet, it demonstrates how easily the message can be altered in either the encoding or the decoding, resulting in two completely different plans of action.

References:

Moran, R. T., Abramson, N. R., & Moran, S. V. (2014). Managing Cultural Differences (9th ed.). Oxford: Routledge.