A culture of a country is the group of characteristics and information about a specific group of people that represent the specific country, and that is including a lot of aspects of the targeted community, such as language, beliefs, social behaviors and arts . There are various ways used to understand a culture of a country, and one of them is to learn the language of the targeted country. However some people argue that we can never understand the culture of a country without learning its spoken language, while there are other who support this. The next coming lines will explain why it’s unreasonable to support this idea, as we already mentioned that there are many ways to consider how to understand a culture.
It’s not fair to judge or consider the fact of understanding a country culture based on only learning its language. In that sense, we could consider travelling to the country that we want to understand its culture as an effective way to recognize and achieve our goal. It will give you the opportunity to experience and live among the community of the country. Which means getting yourself involved in the chosen country (Anon., no date.). As well as, that it will open yourself to it and it will help to connect with people from there because it’s obvious that being close to someone with a different culture will help you understand his/her culture directly. So it’s important to be connected to reach the goal of understanding the targeted culture.
Another way to understand a culture is to do some researches on Internet, in order to learn more about the culture we need to understand. We can do these researches by reading the news of other countries or by following the social media pages that are related to the culture we are looking to understand. That is including its entertainment pages, politics news or even the trends (wikiHow Staff, no date.). By applying this method , you get more information about what happened on this culture, the way they behave, talk and communicate. All information you can get by the mentioned way will lead you to understand and learn more to understand the culture.
Reading books and articles that are written by people from the targeted culture can also help to understand the culture of the country they represent (Religion and Race, no date.). It is considered as great key to open the hidden culture of where these people belong to, cause the way they write or express their ideas are directly connected to their culture and experiences.
Studying history of the targeted country could drive us to a better understanding of its culture. It’s actually a fact that doesn’t hide because the history will teach you a working understanding of change that make a specific culture on its appearance. It will help us to understand more than we can expect because we will be aware of the reasons that causes a kind of different behavior or of act. Further more, we can consider how a culture has been shaped by its old circumstances, norms, or even personal experiences (Anon, 2016). This also will explain the reality of the studied culture.
Food etiquette, it could seem crazy to some of us, but it really make a huge difference for others depending on our cultural backgrounds and experiences. It is manifested in the way we eat the food because we all grow up eating various way. From the dishes we use to the places where we eat our food to who we eat with such as family and parents. In general, there are such different ways or habits of eat. To explain, in some Arabic area women eat separately from men. In some other cultures, it’s rude to get up from the table before everybody finish his/her own dish or if someone finishes everything on his/her plate. Learning food etiquette could drive us to understand a culture of a country and it’s reasonable way than we thought.
There could be some other ways that I didn’t mention on the previous lines, that doesn’t make them inappropriate for understanding a culture. What I wrote is just a result of long search and what I reached by merging different opinions and ideas. And to be honest the direction I choose on previous paragraph doesn’t mean that I’m totally against to the main topic idea, but it was a specific points of view that most of us. don’t know them.
