“Changing the Language” Response
In the story “Changing the Language” from the blog Effective Communication, Denny Dong writes about the difficulty that results from communicating with his parents when he is not fluent in Chinese, and they are not fluent in English. In order to fix this problem, he said that he started to google translate his messages to them into Chinese characters so that his parents would have an easier time understanding what he was trying to say.
What stood out to me in this story?
I found this story very interesting because it shows that communicating well is not always easy, and sometimes you need to put in some extra effort. In “Changing the Language”, Denny Dong states that he, “came to realize that that was created within the parental relationship derived from miscommunication” (2018). In other words, if parents and children can put effort into communicating better they may be able to ease tensions in their relationship.
This is a very good point to make because often we recognize that there is a miscommunication with someone in our life, but we do not do anything to fix it. When you are communicating with someone, it is very important to make sure that you are speaking (or writing) in a way that will be easy for them to understand.
My Response
Even though I do not personally have any family members who speak a different language than me, that does not mean that I will not encounter language barriers in my communications with others in my future professional and personal life. For this reason, I think that this story could resonate with anyone.
For example, my dad does a lot of business with people in China at his job. He said that it can be difficult at times to communicate clearly with them because of the added difficulty of a language barrier. This shows that language barriers in communication affect everyone, and will most likely affect me too.
In situations like this, it is important to put in extra effort to make your communications more clear. It is easy to forget how important the quality of the communication is, and it is also easy to neglect putting in the extra effort necessary to make it easier for your audience to understand. In the workplace, however, it can be essential to do this because good communication often equates success.
I plan to keep this in mind as I continue to work on my communication skills. It is always important to think about who your audience is and what their needs are, because you have to adjust your communication to work best for them. If I take the time to put in extra effort and make sure that my medium and my content of my communication fits my audience, I am sure I will be more a more successful communicator both personally and professionally.
Citation
Dong, D. (2018, March 1). Changing the Language. [Effective Communication]. Retrieved from https://medium.com/effective-communication/changing-the-language-7d29f3496133
