Since it was a sunny day in the Netherlands, our blog group decided to have lunch at a picturesque park called De Haagse Bos, which is located near Den Haag Centraal. After lunch we went for a walk to explore the entire park, which offered a little escape from the loud and busy city life. One of the paths led us to a peaceful place in the middle of the park, surrounded by various trees and deers who have been living there in a nature reservation. Nils could not participate the meeting because he visited his family in Berlin, nevertheless he participated our discussions via video call.
Our group held interesting discussions about all of Hall's six key concepts and it was mindblowing to realize how different our cultures really were. While Luka (Croatia) and Lee (South-Korea) rather consider their cultures to be high context, Nils (Germany) and Patrick (Switzerland) clearly come from a low-context culture, where information flow is defined as explicit, direct and clear. Therfore, we noticed a lot of differences in the way we expressed us. In high-context cultures, saying "today is good weather!" to your friend or family means "Let's go out today!" In low context cultures, this expression simply states that the weather is nice. Soon we realized that reading in between the lines is very important in high context communication. When it comes to low context communication, clear expression and the words itself are more important.
While standing in line for a bus to arrive, we talked about personal space. Hall distinguishes four relationships and their appropriate distances (public, social, personal and intimate space), wich all differ from culture to culture and person to person. We often feel interrupted or disturbed when someone enters our personal space. In high context Asian countries like South Korea, the personal space is usually smaller than in European low context countries like Croatia, Switzerland and Germany. At the bus line we noticed that standing close to others affects Lee less than for instance Luka.
What genuinely felt true for all our nationalities is a linear timeline of executing tasks. We all like to do one thing at a time and work task-oriented. Plans and schedules are very common in our cultures. We therefore all consider our cultures as monochronic. Hall and Hall defined this as "Compartmentalisation". What we all like about doing tasks monochronic is that it allows us to stay goal oriented and not lose focus at work.
Language Lesson 1
During our first language lesson we all learned to introduce ourselves in one of the languages represented in our group.
Croatian (Luka)
Drago mi je. = Nice to meet you.
Zovem se... = My name is...
Hvala = Thank you.
Swiss German (Patrick)
Freut mi = Nice to meet you.
I heisse = My name is...
Merci = Thank you.
Korean (Lee)
만나서 반갑습니다 = Nice to meet you.
저의 이름은 = My name is...
고맙습니다 = Thank you.
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