The successes and failures of a non-spanish speaker communicating with the locals in spain.1/29/2015 Topic: Issues of Communication for foreigners while visiting Spain.
Matt Thome Communication between humans and the different mediums that we use to communicate has been an interest of mine for many years. I’ve studied how humans interact within the same culture, but when one culture meets another culture all of the general rules about human communication go out the window. From verbal communication, written communication and body language, the differences between the two cultures are many. Before we went on the trip I knew quite a bit about body language and the tone of voice that Americans use in their daily life. There are so many things that we do that there are way too many to put here. Some examples would be proximity to each other, the way we form our questions, the tone of voice that we use in certain situations and how we feel about touching each other. I didn’t have to do much research for this topic as I knew a lot about generalities in this topic and I figured the best way to learn about it was to just experience it. I couldn’t find many sources on cross-cultural communication that were free. There were many books but they were all over fifty dollars and I didn’t feel that a book like that was necessary for this project. Also, we had talked about proximity in conversation during class. There were many things that I discovered while we were on our trip in Spain. First off, people talk very fast. Not that this would mean anything to a non-Spanish speaker, as they would not be able to understand. Also, people speak very close together. For me, this wasn’t uncommon to me because my family is this way and being close to another person does not bother me. Also, the customary kisses on the cheek do not bother me as I have been luck enough to have been raised in a very cultured lifestyle where I have met many people of different backgrounds and have had this happen to me many times before. I speak a small amount of Spanish so this was a bit of a shock when trying to have a basic conversation with a clerk or server. Ordering food was an interesting experience as well. As far as reading a menu went, I could figure it out for the most part based on context clues and my past knowledge. In the larger cities like Madrid and Barcelona, many street signs had both the Spanish writing on the signs as well as English in subscript. However, in the smaller cities like Oviedo, Salamanca and San Sebastian it was more difficult to get around of your own as everything was in their native language with no translation to anything else. Often, restaurants would have an English menu that had numbers associated with the entrees so that the servers could figure out what we wanted to order by having the guest point to the number on the menu. This helps a lot when the server does not speak English and the guests do not speak Spanish. It was also very common for restaurants to have menus in Portuguese, French, German and Italian as many tourists come to Spain from these countries during the winter months. Also, street markers were different that what we see in the United States. In the United States, street markers are directly on the street corner high in the air on a pole. In Spain, they are on a tile that is placed on the side of the buildings. Often, they are very hard to find as they are made to blend into the house. This made it difficult to get around and we often missed streets that we were going to turn on. I understand why this isn’t a big issue for Spanish people. Often, they don’t go far out of their neighborhoods since the cities are mostly pedestrian cities. Therefore, they don’t need the “in your face” markings like we have in America since they know their areas very well. The airports were very easy to navigate as they almost always had English written in a subscript on the signs and it seemed like everyone in the airport knew English. I actually expected this because around the world, air travel is based on English. This is so that air traffic controllers can communicate with crew effectively during flight and so that there is no confusion between pilots and staff of different nations. This is a world wide standard. Even if a French airline is flying domestically in French and there are no Americans involved the pilots and air traffic controllers still speak in English because that is the standard. Overall, I think it is very possible for a non-Spanish speaker to survive in Spain for a few weeks. There are many adaptations made in touristic areas to make sure that things can be understood. Although sometimes communicating is difficult, traveling to Spain is well worth the small struggles that you would have. Spain is a fantastic nation with a ton of history and someone should not avoid going somewhere just because they don’t speak the language. How else would the world have expanded if people feared having to communicate in new lands?
3 Comments
Erika
1/29/2015 07:19:56 am
As a person who does not speak Spanish at all, I found those numbered menus to be incredibly helpful even when they were entirely in Spanish. That way I had less of a chance to completely murder the pronunciation.
Matt Burton
1/30/2015 03:15:24 am
This i think resonates with most of us, because not many of us came in with a large amount of spanish( including myself), and it tended to be very difficult to find your way around, order food, or barter with people for a good price at a shop. Its very strange to be somewhere where they do not speak your native tongue and have to accommodate to that, Luckily the people in spain were very kind about our awful pronunciation and slow ordering! Leave a Reply. |