In cross-cultural communication,Language and culture are inseparable from each other. if the two parties in the communication cannot enter the same cultural context, it is easy to get confused, and result in communication failure. there comes out a lot of misunderstanding due to the cultural difference.

For example, in traditional Chinese culture, the color red generally gives us the impression that with the bright, eye-catching, warm, happy and harvest. Such as year-end bonuses, give the red envelopes and so on.

In the English “red” sometimes link with “radical red”, have some political overtones. Generally speaking, the western people prefer a frank conversation, with humorous speech, but the Chinese people prefer subtle, gentle communication.

There are also great differences in the dinner activities between Chinese and Western culture, when Chinese make a treat, they like toast to the guests again and again, fear the guests are not satisfied. But westerners, especially Americans, the host usually toast for one time, they hope the guests help themselves, eat whatever you want.

If you do not like a dish, you can honestly, but politely say you are not used to eating this dish, but the food on your plate, it is best to eat up and drank up, It is necessary to acquaint the different habits, or else you may either be hungry enough to eat, or be in a embarrassing scene.

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Therefore, to understand a country’s cultures, to avoid these cross-cultural communication problem is a practical issue we are facing now. So it is necessary for us to strengthen English culture study and cultivate the culture awareness in order to improve our cross-culture communicative competence. There are various cultural elements affecting English learning and we may take different approaches to improve the culture awareness.

We must constantly improve our own cultural enrichment. Cultural background is all-inclusive, broadly speaking, which includes the country’s political, economic, history, geography, art, religion, customs, rituals, moral, ethical, psychological and social aspects of life; To a narrow sense, language is an important carrier of culture, such as: daily language, terminology, idiom, proverbs and other folk expressions and body language, which all can reflect a lot of cultural background knowledge.

Cultural awareness need learn and to be trained slowly. Learn knowledge from books. Broaden our horizons, we can quickly and effectively understand foreign customs and cultural background. However, the knowledge from books is too rigid, but using a language is flexible, even different regions from the same country.

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The same situation also have many different expression ways, so try to create a language foreign language learning context is particularly important. A variety of information can be widely used in our daily life. We can make foreign friends, studied various forms of literary works, watch exciting videos foreign films, foreign language songs to enjoy elegant variety of sources to understand foreign cultures.

After get sufficient cultural customs knowledge and acquaintance of western countries, maybe one day we can make the translation natural and flexible like native speakers.

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