Tag: language

absolutely intercultural 129 +++ comfort zones +++ dangerous situations +++ scary moments +++ classical artist +++

your comfort zoneWelcome to show 129 of our Podcast “absolutely-intercultural”. Thanks you again to all of you who have helped us win in the non-profit category of the European Podcast Awards (fourth place in Germany and even number 1 in Denmark!). We really appreciate all your input and the attention our podcast has received as a result. We feel absolutely comfortable seeing that what we produce seems to have a wide audience of listeners.

absolutely scared
Today we are going to talk about comfort zones and especially leaving our comfort zones. A comfort zone is the place where you feel comfortable, where everything seems to be easy and under your control. But what happens if you have to leave this comfort zone because of a change in your life or if you decide out of your own free will to leave your comfort zone? In our first category I had a meeting with people who have chosen to spend some time outside their comfort zones – by going to a foreign country: Lucy from Australia, Gintare and Vaida from Lithuania and Yasha from Turkmenistan decided to leave their comfort behind and experience something new. They left their home countries and entered a new world. I asked them which situations in their new lives were the scariest.

absolutely dangerous
If the feeling is strong, you may even feel out of place or unsafe in your new environments. This happened to Beatrice, when she went to Egypt on a holiday for the first time and all the new impressions, smells, the loudness of the street and the different behaviors of people she met, made her feel like a fish out of the water and she was even a little scared. In our second category I asked whether she could still remember leaving her comfort zone for the first time.

absolutely prepared
In our next category I will return to our round table, where the foreign students tell me how they try to introduce familiar objects from their home countries into their unfamiliar surroundings in order to be a little more comfortable even outside their comfort zones. But first I asked the participants to tell me what situations in their host country made them most uncomfortable.

absolutely comfortable
When I was putting together this podcast it seemed that nowadays it is a universal truth that we need to leave our comfort zones all the time? But can that really be right? I went out of my way to find someone who says that there are professions where everybody would want you to stay within the comfort zone. How ironic, I actually had to find an artist who would speak in favor of comfort zones so in our fourth and last category I finally spoke to Paul MacAlindin, a classical musician who is active in organizing international orchestra performances, e.g. for the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq, of which he is the Musical Director. I asked him where he leaves his comfort zones during his artistic work and also in his private life. To my surprise he explained that in classical music most stakeholders prefer not to leave their comfort zones.

Our next show will be coming to you from Anne Fox in Denmark on 05  March

Until then –
Bleiben Sie absolut interkulturell!

The host of this show is: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Editor: Dino Nogarole

absolutely intercultural 127 +++ e-mail addicted +++ communication guide +++ social media +++ digital media +++

Today we are going to talk about how important social media and email have become in our lives. Do they help us be more productive or do they dominate our daily lives? 2010 may have ended peacefully and the holiday season was pretty calm but what was your first look at the internet like when you came back to work? Hundreds of email messages that were waiting for an answer? Dozens of requests to join somebody’s Linked-In network or to accept or decline messages because you are the moderator of a list or a blog? To be honest, after 10 minutes at the computer where I felt like a fire-fighter trying to get the worst catastrophies under control I was tempted to shut down the computer and do some “real work”. But did I? No, somehow I felt I needed to write quick answers, press “Like” butt0ns on Facebook and accept digital invitations because it all looked so urgent and real even though I was alone in my office and all the urgency was “only digital”.

absolutely addicted
I met Elaine and Will and had a discussion about how to monitor your work-life balance and perhaps separate your business and your private lives. In this respect almost all my friends fall into one of two very separate cultures and will explain to you that their particular work situation (rather than their own choice) determines their behavior. Are you the kind of a person who will switch off totally after work and recharge your batteries so that you can perform well in the work place afterwards? Or are you always connected and keep checking your email account at home even when you should be preparing dinner? If you decide not to look at your work email at home, does that this really mean that you are less than fully committed to your job or does the constant digital connection to your work place show that you cannot let go and eventually lead to burn-out syndrome? However we deal with this, most of us somehow have a bad conscience about our work-life balance one way or another, so let us discuss this and see whether digital addiction is actually a bad thing? In our first category Elaine and Will describe how two partners deal with this daily challenge in very different ways.

absolutely professional
In our second category Andreas Faulstich tells our interviewer Maria that some badly written email messages can drive him crazy and cause him a lot of extra work. Fortunately, there are only few messages which steal his time. Listen to how he tries to deal with these messages and how he suggests writing email messages more professionally. First, Maria asked Andreas how many email messages he receives every day?

absolutely connected
In our last category we organized a round table where I am talking with Lucy, Emese and Markus about how students who leave their home universities and study abroad can stay connected with family, friends and their home university through the digital media. Do we perhaps need to choose different channels for different target groups?

Our next show will be coming to you from Anne Fox in Denmark on 04. February

Until then –
Bleiben Sie absolut interkulturell!

The host of this show is: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Editor: Dino Nogarole

absolutely intercultural 126 +++ small talk +++ Frendo +++ Korea +++ respect +++ apps +++

Happy New Year or should that be Appy New Year from Absolutely Intercultural, the podcast about all things intercultural? My name’s Anne Fox and this podcast is coming to you from Denmark. This is show number 126, the first one of 2011 or 20 11 as I should probably start to call it. So why Appy New Year? Well in this show I will be introducing you to 3 so-called apps which could help you in your efforts to understand more about intercultural communication.

This is the first time I’m making a show after learning about our win in the European podcast awards for 2010. We won in the non-profit category and I just want to add my thanks to all those of you who voted for us and also to all those of you who have contributed to the show by speaking with me and Laurent over the years. Without you as our conversation partners this podcast would be impossible.

absolutely trivial
The topic of small talk is often part of a language course, though not a very important one. But when I talked to Evan Frendo in Germany I discovered that small talk is actually a very important building block of working relationships. Here are links to Evan’s blog and his latest book, Intercultural Business English for German learners of English working in Asia.

absolutely useful?
You may remember that in my last show we found out about South Korea from a Chinese perspective when I spoke with Carol who is doing a year’s study exchange there. What also interested me was how she was going to use Korean when she went back to China. So is Korean absolutely useful to Chinese people? Thanks again to Carol who got in touch with us to tell us about her Korean experiences. She certainly showed herself to be adaptable when faced with a sensitive intercultural situation.

absolutely adaptable
And adaptability is something which Kenyan teacher, Samuel Osamba still needs to practice even though he has been in the USA for over 20 years now. Let’s hear how absolutely adaptable he needs to be in the classroom.

absolutely word for word
I think that culture and language are closely connected which is why we often also talk about language learning on this podcast. As a teacher I am very impressed with the web site called Listen and Write in which language learners can do dictation exercises around short audio snippets often from YouTube videos or Voice of America broadcasts. Since we sometimes get asked for transcripts of the show I wondered if we could combine the two and upload short extracts from the show to Listen & Write for you to work with if you are a language learner. So the first one features the first part of Evan Frendo’s segment about small talk.

absolutely essential
But am I right in thinking that culture and language are inextricably mixed? I have recently read a blog post by a respected English teacher who said that he didn’t see any reason to include intercultural communication in his English classes. Since Evan Frendo includes a great deal of intercultural communication in his classes I asked him for his view. Is it absolutely essential in language teaching?

appsolutely mobile
After speaking with Evan I signed up to his Twitter feed and discovered a link he had posted about a language app. Apps are small programs that you can download to your mobile phone, tablet or mp3 player. There are thousands of them and I suddenly became curious whether there were any to do with intercultural communication. So in this final segment we’ll go appsolutely mobile (and I hope you heard my pronunciation there!)

So the first app is called Word Lens and works by translating any sign that you photograph. At the moment the only language pair available is English and Spanish so this means that you can photograph a Spanish sign and get an English translation or vice versa. Useful for restaurant menus I would imagine. The catch here though is that although the app is free, you have to buy the dictionary. But when it works, it’s like magic.

The second app I found was called Fasten Seatbelts and this gives you snippets of information about different cultures both in text format and in the form of short videos. Now this one is completely free. The first edition was a collection of Do’s and Don’ts for European countries and the second edition now covers a range of Asian countries.

The third app I found is called Cultural GPS and allows you to see the different Hofstede profiles for 98 different countries in the free version. In the pro version you can create your own personal cultural profile and compare it to any one of the 98 countries or compare pairs of countries to highlight differences and similarities. This is the one I liked the most and I’d be really interested to find out what you think about it.

All in all I think that this was an interesting little project but I have come to the conclusion that these apps can only help with simplistic culture specifics and don’t really help with the more rewarding culture-general aspects of intercultural communication. But maybe you know of other interesting apps? If so then do tell us about it in a comment here on the blog  or send us an email. We’d also be very happy if you recorded something for us to include in the show. Well that’s it for this show.

Our next show will be coming to you from Dr. Laurent Borgmann in Germany on 21st January.

So long … stay tuned!

The host of this show is Anne Fox : Editor: Dino Nogarole

absolutely intercultural 125 +++ Christmas time +++ New Year’s resolutions +++ international Xmas +++

Today is the 24th of December – this means Christmas trees, mulled wine, lots of snow recently, and if you were lucky you may have spotted the odd reindeer. In our show today I asked how my guests celebrate Christmas in Australia, Hungary and Germany but also how people formulate their New Year’s resolutions in different cultures.

absolutely santa
Our exchange student and podcast enthusiast Lucy Warren talks to Barbara Neukirchen, who is responsible for the outgoing students from RheinAhrCampus, Remagen. Lucy is interested in how Barbara celebrates Christmas time and whether this could be seen as typical for Germany. In our first category Barbara tells Lucy on which days Germans celebrate Christmas and how they celebrate the count-down to Christmas.

absolutely positive
Have you thought about your New Year’s resolutions? For example stop smoking or drinking less alcohol? Or losing a couple of pounds by going to the gym regularly? I asked Beatrice about her resolutions and she explained to me the difference between positive and negative ones. In our second category we listen to Beatrice’s view about New Year’s resolutions.

absolutely festive
I put together a round table with Lucy from Australia, Emese from Hungary and Andreas from Germany. All of them shared their typical customs and Christmas traditions from their families with me. Of course this does not mean that everybody in their culture celebrates in the same way – sometimes this may be just the culture of that particular family or region. Let us listen to very different experience which range from Christmas on the beach to Advent Calendars.

Our next show will be coming to you from Anne Fox in Denmark on 07. January 2011

The Team of “absolutely-intercultural” wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Thank you for supporting us!

Until then –
Bleiben Sie absolut interkulturell!

The host of this show is: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Editor: Dino Nogarole

absolutely intercultural 123 +++ stereotypes +++ traveling +++ foreign countries +++

On this show (no. 123) we will hear from the US, from South Korea and from Lebanon in the Middle East. I think this mix promises your dose of culture shocks from around the world and insights into new ways of thinking.

absolutely unpunctual
Have you ever made the experience that you traveled in a foreign country and because of your preparation or knowledge about this country your head is spinning with ready-made clichés about the people in that country? Often, when we are well prepared we really have the impression that we know a lot about the country we visit and the people who live there – but are these preconceived ideas the truth? Are they even helpful? In our first category I talked with Yoav Wachsmann, an American professor (originally from Israel) who travels a lot and comes over to Germany regularly. He told me what he liked most about his time in Europe but also how he had to revise his stereotypes as he was getting to know the Germans. He tells us an interesting story of misinterpretation where he thought that his German students were always late for their class until he discovered that in German Academia there is a system which could be called “formalized impunctuality”.

absolutely perfect
In our next category Anne Gründer, a student from Rhein Ahr Campus in Remagen told me why she took South-Korea as her destination for her semester abroad and what her friends’ reaction were like when they hear about that. Let us listen to how she enjoyed her trip to a completely different world and culture and how she spent her time in Korea.

absolutely specialized
Jennifer, an American professor who is teaching in Lebanon told me her story! She comes from Boston, in the US, is married with a Lebanese and is now living in Beirut. Many people back home are worried about her safety, because it seems to be dangerous living there, particularly as an American. But is it true? Is life more dangerous than in the US? In our last category Jennifer shared with me some stories, experiences she made in class and what she is missing most from the American culture.

Our next show will be coming to you from Anne Fox in Denmark on 10. December

Until then –
Bleiben Sie absolut interkulturell!

The host of this show is: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Editor: Dino Nogarole

absolutely intercultural 121 +++ intercultural meetings +++ round table +++ positive thinking +++

intercultural meetingsToday our topic is about intercultural meetings and I have a co-host, Lucy, from Australia. Maybe some of you remember her from one of our last shows, in which I interviewed her about her first impressions of Europe. She is doing an internship at Rhein Ahr Campus in Remagen and has agreed to help our editor Dino and me with this episode.

absolutely adversarial
Do you often take part in meetings? Do you like meetings or do you think they are a waste of time? Have you ever taken part in an international meeting, with participants from all over the world? If you have and if you had no problems, congratulations – you are perhaps a natural talent? For those of you who never had the chance to participate in such a meeting, let me tell you, it can be full of traps and dangers.  Imagine a room with people from 6 or 7 different countries, that means 6 or 7 different cultures and different working habits. Now you can imagine that such a meeting can be a challenge for all participants. At a round table discussion Lucy, Dino and I discussed some topics relating to taking care and being aware of different attitudes in meetings.

absolutely international
Try to remember meetings in your own culture. What is the predominant style for finding the truth or for taking a difficult decision? Do participants seem to “fight each other” with words and arguments like lawyers in an adversarial system or are you used to the consensual approach which concentrates more on the common ground between different opinions and not so much on the differences?
Let us include two more cultures in this. Nicole is from Austria and Thomas from the Czech Republic. They shared with me their experiences of meetings. Sometimes you have to spend all day in project meetings with your colleagues, and after the meetings you may want to be on your own.

absolutely well prepared
Now for the second part of the round table. Controversies within a meeting are discussed as well as which document is needed, what preparation needs to be done and what the perfect duration of a meeting is. Also, stay tuned to find out how  Lucy picked on a poor German girl during one of my meetings… If you only remember one thing from this podcast let it be this piece of advice – make sure you are mentioned in the minutes after a meeting, otherwise it’s like you were never there!

Our next show will be coming to you from Anne Fox in Denmark on 12. November

Until then –
Bleiben Sie absolut interkulturell!

The host of this show is: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Editor: Dino Nogarole

absoutely intercultural 119 +++ Australian impressions +++ Erasmus life +++ Turkish challenge +++

Australian Intern Lucy Warren at RheinAhrCampusMerhaba, welcome, and iyi günler. Yes, I have learned some basic Turkish and took part in a beginners’ language course. Why did I do that? Well, here in Germany we have important Turkish communities in our big cities, so my idea was to learn more about their language and their culture.
G’day from down under! I also want to present Lucy! Lucy is one of our new members in the international team of the Rhein AhrCampus in Remagen. She is from Australia and over the next months we might hear more from her if she decides to help us with this podcast.

absolutely up-above
As you know, every year we have a number of international students, who visit us to spend a semester or two at our university. One of our newly arrived incoming students is Lucy Warren from the University of the Sunshine Coast. She is half Australian and half South African. So I asked her about the first impressions she had after her arrival and what differences she has noticed in Europe. Perhaps we will be able to convince Lucy to keep us up to date with her intercultural discoveries throughout her stay over the next months? In our first category she told me her stereotypes about Europe and the very first impressions she gained.

absolutely changed
I took an interview with Maria Koehnen. She spent a semester in Belgium where she met a number of international students from all over the world. She explained to me how to get an ERASMUS scholarship and stressed the advantages of a semester abroad. So, how can one semester abroad change you so much?

absolutely challenged
A couple of weeks ago I created my own challenge. I took part on an intensive Turkish language course at Netzwerk Deutsch in Cologne for one week. Many friends and colleagues asked me “Why Turkish?” and it is true that as I have learned English, Latin, French and Italian at school and at university, it would have been a little more plausible to learn Spanish for example. And clearly this would have been a lot easier for me! However, in our private and professional lives we are surrounded by people from all over the world, with different languages and different cultures. On my way to our supermarket I actually meet more people who can speak Turkish than people who can speak English as I live very close to a Turkish community in Cologne. So my aim was to learn more about this culture and now I am proud to say, that when I went to my Turkish corner shop last week, I managed to do the small talk in Turkish. I am amazed at the reactions, shop keepers immediately turn into friends. It is almost as if I was the first person they have met who has learned a little bit of Turkish just for my social life. I must admit though that learning Turkish was the hardest thing I have ever learned in my whole life and in our third and last category I talked with participants and the teacher of my Turkish course, and we tried to find out, why people choose or reject the challenge of learning Turkish.

Enjoy listening to our show no. 119

Our next show will be coming to you from Anne Fox in Denmark on 15.October

Until then –
Bleiben Sie absolut interkulturell!

The host of this show is: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Editor: Dino Nogarole

absolutely intercultural 117 +++ Chinese food +++ Belgium habits +++ Hong Kong adventure +++

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fortes/279647509/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Let us  take you on a culinary audio-trip to China and Belgium. Yes, let us talk about food! In previous shows we’ve talked about going abroad, about culture shocks and the different habits in foreign countries. But apart from the language and the attitudes of the other culture, what about the local cuisine? What happens if you travel to a country in which you don’t know anything about the food culture? Can you prepare yourself for such a situation before you leave?

absolutely different
I am not sure whether you have seen the film Julie and Julia which is all about food and preparing food and eating food and cultural differences between food in America and food in France. If you have not seen the film, please put it at the top of your list of films to see because it is full of little intercultural gems and Meryl Streep is just incredible in it. In the film Meryl Streep plays Julia Child, an American who is the wife of a diplomat in Paris and falls in love with the French way of cooking. She decides to introduce the French cuisine to the American housewife of the fifties by writing the book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”
Now, what about you? What are you like? When you travel to a foreign country, where you have a totally different cuisine from home? I asked Mingxia, one of my business students from China, if the food offered in Chinese restaurants in Europe is the same as food offered in China.

absolutely fun
When we talk about countries like China we expect a big difference in food habits, but how about our European neighbors – for example the Belgians? Normally we would think that we have a lot in common, but Filip Dedeurwaerder told me that even the time we spend eating our food is very different. For example, while in Germany we often only take half an hour to eat during our lunch break, the Belgians take much more time to celebrate their food and are allowed to have a glass of wine with their lunch. So, eating and drinking habits seem to be very different even with our closest neighbors.

absolutely adventurous
Carina Mayer, a student from the RheinAhrCampus in Remagen, did an internship in Hong Kong, searching for a cultural change and new experiences. She gives us some insights into her experiences with the Chinese cuisine. It seems that she was eager to try everything that the Chinese put on her plate. She often went out to try out and enjoy the variety of the Chinese cuisine with her colleagues. Carina is really adventurous and was looking for a totally new experience and that was exactly what she got.

Our next show will be coming to you from Anne Fox in Denmark on 18.September

Until then –
Bleiben Sie absolut interkulturell!

The host of this show is: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Editor: Dino Nogarole

absolutely intercultural 115 +++ academic integration +++ incoming students +++ buddy system +++ cultural diversity +++

Council of Europe by "notfrancois" on FlickrWhat can universities do to integrate foreign students interculturally? The Council of Europe’s White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue demands that “Higher-education institutions play an important role in fostering intercultural dialogue, through their education programmes, as actors in broader society and as sites where intercultural dialogue is put into practice”. So, let us look at how this political demand is put into practice by talking to both, students and experienced professionals who are responsible for integrating foreign students in universities.

absolutely welcome
The Steering Committee on Higher Education and Research suggests, that “the university is ideally defined precisely by its universality – its commitment to open-mindedness and openness to the world, founded on enlightenment values. The university thus has great potential to engender ‘intercultural intellectuals’ who can play an active role in the public sphere”.
So let us do a reality check and find out how this open-mindedness and openness of the universities is put into practice in real life. Which methods are used to integrate incoming students in the daily academic life in the foreign country? I spoke with Adelheid Korpp, who is responsible for the incoming students at RheinAhrCampus in Remagen. In our first category, she told me what methods are used for facilitating intercultural integration for the foreign students. In fact, her services starts long before the students arrive in Germany.

absolutely helpful
One of these student mentors is Tobias Pfanner who has worked and studied in Canada and Australia and from his own experience he already knew how important intercultural mentors can be at the beginning of your stay abroad. He told me the story, how he took the decision to be a “buddy” and help a foreign student have a good start in Germany.

absolutely Spanish
Are these methods of integration the same in different universities? Our student editor Dino spent a semester in León in Spain. In our next category he explains what our partner university did to integrate foreign students interculturally and help them network with each other. Do they also use a “buddy system”?

absolutely integrated
Unfortunately, not every stay abroad is well prepared and crowned with academic success stories. In our next category I asked Adelheid what happens if the intercultural integration does not work as well as we have heard in our previous stories? Do international students sometimes turn up in the international office in tears because they cannot make friends or because they cannot follow the academic courses in the foreign language?

absolutely flexible
In our last category, David shares his intercultural experiences at the university in Russia. Of course he he was prepared for seeing different behaviours even for facing situations which in his home country are unthinkable. However, even though he was well prepared for his stay in Russia the attitude of showing “flexibility in exams” reserved some culture shocks for him and the other foreign students. In my conversation with David we also talked about the role of the new social media for getting in contact and staying in contact with your new intercultural acquaintances after your stay abroad. However, in different countries students use different social media to get in touch and keep in contact.

Our next show will be coming to you from Anne Fox in Denmark on 21 August

Until then –
Bleiben Sie absolut interkulturell!

The host of this show is: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Editor: Dino Nogarole

absolutely intercultural 114 +++ China +++ Verge +++ LTS Training +++ Intercultural course design +++ Pilbeam +++ Comfortable Communication +++

In this show we’re going to go to the UK and China to find out about opportunities for learning more about intercultural communication. We’ll be meeting Richard Wood, one of the founders of Verge, a cross-cultural communication company based in Hefei, China. We’ll also be meeting with Adrian Pilbeam who runs two courses to help people get started in intercultural training and if you’re lucky you can get these for free!

absolutely trained
So let’s start with the main topic of this show which is about how you can get a solid grounding in how to do intercultural training by attending one of 2 five-day courses which is usually held in Bath, England but has also been held in other countries by special request. I talked with Adrian Pilbeam, one of the main instigators of the course and also one of the main facilitators about what you can learn in five days.

absolutely comfortable
The need for intercultural training is a growing one especially in the economic powerhouse which is China. So for my next piece I contacted Richard Wood, one of the founders of Verge, a cross-cultural communication company based in Hefei, China. Richard’s company has come up with the idea of Comfortable Communication. So we find out what that means.

absolutely free
It’s obvious that there is a huge potential demand for this sort of training and if you liked the sound of the course which Adrian Pilbeam  at LTS Training was offering earlier then if you are based in Europe there is even more good news as Adrian’s courses could be ‘absolutely free’ if you are based in Europe as you could then get it funded through the Grundtvig scheme.

absolutely uncomfortable
And if you’re in any doubt that intercultural training might be a good idea then you should take note of this cautionary tale from Richard Wood of Verge. Here he is describing an example when he was absolutely uncomfortable! We’ll be hearing more from Richard in a future show about how he trains his Chinese students to avoid these uncomfortable situations. In the meantime I hope that you are on your way to comfortable communication.

You may be pleased to know that this is absolutely your last chance to vote for us in the European Podcast awards as voting closes at the end of July! Unfortunately we have no way of knowing how well or badly we are doing but I would like to extend a big thank you to all those of you who have voted for us so far. You can leave us a comment about what you liked or what we could do better here on our website and you can also make a suggestion about who or what we should feature in future shows.

The next show will be coming to you from Germany with Laurent Borgmann on August 6th so until then stay tuned!

Don’t forget that you can still vote for us in the European Podcast Awards both on the German page and the Danish page.

The next show will be coming to you on 11 June from Dr. Laurent Borgmann in Germany.

So long…stay tuned!

The host of this show is: Anne Fox
Editor: Dino Nogarole
Picture credit: Bigstockphoto.com