Marshmallow challenge!

Describe the different personalities and communication styles of people in your team.How did people work together? What helped or hindered collaboration?

    In our team, almost the German classmate builded the  structure. At first, I need to the member structure of our team. We have 5 member, 3 coming from west,frankly communicati

ng with English, 2 coming from east, a Japanese girl and me. And both of us are not good at English. It means 2 of us have the problem of communicate with other member, that’s why we didn’t say a lot when talked about how to build the tower, but luckily there is  a English guy speaking Japanese smoothly. In the discussion, both of us talked few words. Other member, who use direct communication style, were very active and asked our ideas often.At the end, even we had different communication styles, but seems we had a same goal, so we helped each other and finished our challenge.

Member1: American female;direct communication style;expressive emotional communication style

Member2:German male;direct communication style;expressive emotional communication style

Member3:England male;direct communication style;expressive emotional communication style

Member4:Japanese female;indirect communication style;restrained emotional communication style

Member5:Chinese female;indirect communication style;restrained emotional communication style

     In my mind, it is the language and background cultural  that hindered collaboration. I think both of east people are using restrained emotional communication style, because of afraid of making mistakes in using English. As we all known, Japanese has a cultural about avoiding embarrassed theirselves, and a lot of Chinese people are afraid of losing face.  Although they asked our ideas, we just hesitated and answered few words. It waste too much time. As I mentioned before, a same goal help us finished our challenge, even we had difficult in communication.

Question:

Q1: Did you finish the marshmallow challenge?

Q2: What is the most difficult part in working with other cultural background people?

Q3: When you meet with difficulty of communicating, what would you do?

Q4:What lets your team bullied the tower so high/low?

Q5:What hindered you to communicate with others?

communicate style

 Write about your communication style in your journal. Using the terms Indirect-Direct, Restrained-Expressive. Give reasons you generally use this communications style. Are there exceptions? When might you use a different style? Explain. Did you notice similarities or differences between your communication style and your introversion-extroversion mix?

   My personal communication style is indirect and restrained. When someone cause offense to me, I will take examples to make him understand my feeling, instead of telling him directly. At the same time, I won’t express my emotions especially negative emotions. I always use this communication style for several reasons.

   Frist, using indirect ways can help us avoiding to hurt people, at least, not too much. It is safe that making listeners think about what I really want to say, and in the same time, maybe they will understand me by using time to think. 

   Plus, restrained express way is a good way that I can hide my real feeling, and give me a space to protect myself. If I overact, I will blame myself after that. Expressive will make not only myself but also listeners.

    And I won’t change my communication type, because it is not only connect with my individual expression of emotions but also connect with my cultural background. To most of Chinese people, we think expressing our emotions is shame. As a old saying says:” Scandal should keep in our own home”. You can see Chinese people won’t talk about these own business, especially scandals. That means we can not express our negative feeling, even we feel struggle.

    Combining communication style and introversion-extroversion style, these are 4 type of people. I am the most negative one.  Indirect way and reserved expressing are almost the same thing.

Question

(1)Which type is your communication style you will take?Why?

(2) Are you a reserved one or expressive one?

(3) Do you feel the differences between your communication style and you introversion-extroversion?

(4) Do you want to change your communication style?

(5) Why you still using your communication style instead of changing?

Which kinds of friends I will chose as my best friends.

(1)People, who completely accept you the way you are and feel responsible for your problems and welfare.

(2)People, who do their work, attend to their affairs and leave you free to do the same

(3) People, who try to improve themselves and have definite ideals and aims in life

(4)People, who are friendly, lively and enjoy getting together to talk and socialize.

  In these people, I prefer (3) to be my friend, for several reasons. To begin with, people who have definite aims and ideals know what they want to do, so they won’t waste their time to useless object. They seize their days and get me energy and improving my faith to my ideals. Plus, their horizon is broader than other people and can tell me some interesting things I don’t know. Our topics are not only TV drama but also the difficulties against the problems when we face these and tell me the experiences achieving my goals. Talking with those people can often explore my world. Further more, those people have a faith in knowledge, because we can success without knowledge, including something we can’t learn from book, even dealing with problems in our relationship.

   I don’t want the type of (1) becoming my friend. Obviously, we can get along well with each other, and It is good to talk with someone who always agree with me, but it is easily that become a narrow-minded people. What’s more, those people who completely accept me can’t let me cultivate critical thinking, and shot down the door of new world. I am crazy in touching new knowledge, knowing outside world and hearing new ideas, that’s why I can’t accept them. What’s worse, they feel responsible to my private problems. I do know it means they care about me, but I already became adult and I can deal with problems by myself. When I need helps, I will ask.

Questions 

(1)Which types of people you prefer to be your friends? Why?

(2)Compare with other types, which part of this type attract you?

(3)Do you agree with me in the ranking of friends?

(4)What makes differences at only one thing?

(5)Does your best friend is the type you want to be with?

The most important and least things in my relationship

Choose the 2 most important and 1 least important things you want in a relationship from this list.

(1)love(2)romance(3)sex(4)marriage(5)companionship

  In my mind, 2 most important things are love and marriage, and the least important thing is sex.

  Love is the foundation of a long-term relationship. If you want to keep your love healthy, you can’t keep without love. As we all known, in relationships, arguments and conflicts are inevitable. Without love, it is hard to tie the broken couple up again. Because of love, you can forgive his/her faults. Because of love, you can stand his/her shortcomings. Because of love, you can refuse other people’s temptation. Seems love is involved in relationship, I trust it as the most important thing.

  The next important thing is marriage. Comparing with romance, the best advantage is giving your partner an official promise and social statement. It is important to Asia people who think face is very important in their social life. It can explain when Nadeshiko were refused by ikemen, she want to commit suicide. And it also can explain she stay alive, for saigo offering her a marriage. Furthermore, marriage can give you a right, which allows you keeping his or her company when his or her dying.

  The least important thing is sex. Sex is desire within every animal. As human, we are not only a kind of animal, but also person. We have emotion, wisdom, and reason. It makes no sense that treat a desire as most important thing in our mind. You can satisfy your desire through money or pick up someone for one night, if you want. But it doesn’t mean that making sex with other people is right. It is unfaithful and disloyal to your partner. Comparing with other options, it is least matter in relationship.

Questions:

(1)Do you agree with me love is the most important thing in our relationship?

(2)Which is the most important thing in you relationship?And why?

(3)Can you continue a relationships without love?

(4)Is sex does necessity in relationship?

(5)What are you think about marriage? 

Nadeshiko

 Problems of storytelling

Storyteller is a Spanish girl. She told me the story with Spanish tune, and sometimes I couldn’t understand what she said. She just started learning Japanese, so absolutely it is difficult to her to pronounce Japanese. And in the process, she had to repeat to let me understand the whole sentences. We skip some parts, because time is limited. As we all know, in Japanese, even “romaji” is same, but the accentuation will change meaning. Taking “kasa” as a example, when the stress falls on the first syllable of this word, it means umbrella, meanwhile when accentuate the second syllable of this word, it means high places. In the nadeshiko’s story, “romaji” wasn’t accentuated, so it was hard to me to understand which word she wanted to say.

ranking of characters

(1) nadeshiko: She is so brave to pursuit her love. What’s more, she never give up even when she is refused by her friend. But I don’t like the mean of going throw river. It may has other ways to solve the problem without betrayed her love.

(2) husband : He is so kind to marry a woman even he doesn’t love. I can’t give more details because we didn’t finish the story.

(3) friend: He has a right to refuse doing something he doesn’t want to, but it is so mean to turn her down.

(4) boatman: Offer a rude option to a trapped people.

(5) lover: He is so rude to let a lady down who go through a long distant alone just for him.

Questions

(1) What is the biggest problem in storytelling?

(2)Why it become the biggest problem to communicate?

(3)How can you improve the way of communicating?

(4) Which character is your favor?Why?

(5)Which character is the worst one? Why?

Acculturation+Banga

In this journal I want to talk about the acculturation base on Berry’s acculturation model. And use my cultural background to explain my opinion of the strategy I would take assimilation when I meet with cultural shock. But in my mind, I think integration is the best one. 

  Frist, I was born and raised in western-south of China. There are cultural differences between north and south, at the same times, west and east. North is more radical than south at emotion. East is more opening than west at thinking. Seen my family are raised in a small western-south city, their ideas are very conservative. My university is in Beijing, eastern-north of China. It changed my mind. I never go out of my town expect Beijing, and it is my first time study abroad as an exchange student.

Thought the date of freedom, we can see Chinese people are always under government’s control. We have citizen rights but it doesn’t mean we have liberal. That’s why I will use assimilation strategy at the game. Assimilation equal obey protecting me out of minority group. Even I want to use integration to keep my own part from my culture.

In the first time, I played the game with American, so the rule I learned from them is all I knew. In the second time, I played with Asian and just obeyed the new rule without saying a word.

Even taking assimilation is flexible and safety choice, we also need to keep our identity. Through civilization revolution, we threw our tradition that we insisted 3000 years. At that time, if we use assimilation to protect our individual, maybe things will be different. Our society will be less homogeneity.

The reason I choose integration is go for our identity. It can remind us who we were and who we are.

Questions:

(1) How is your country?

(2) Which one do you prefer to choose?

(3) Why do you choose this ?

(4) What do you think about integration?

(5)What do you think about assimilation?