Part 1:
First off I thought it would be somewhat easy to not speak for only 15 minutes, but it was frustrating! My mom was talking to me and I would just nod or shake my head and she started questioning if I was ok. I would just shrug my shoulders and keep nodding. It sort of put my mom and I in an awkward situation and conversation. My mom did alter her way of communicating with my absence of communication. She quickly changed the subject of how our days were going, to if my boyfriend and I were ok. She started going on and on about boys and if it make me feel better if I wanted to go shoe shopping with her that day. I think the 15 minutes were up and I took her on for the shoe shopping:)
I personally think if two entirely different cultures met up, I believe it would be better to use hand signals and such rather than talking. Even though it was hard for me with my mom, yet my mom is used to me talking a lot. So for me not to talk much and just use hand motions it was bothersome for her. I work at a restaurant and a lot of the cooks speak Spanish. Most of the time when I started out I would use hands signals and they would too. We understood completely rather than trying to speak the other language to each other. Now I caught onto Spanish and can speak it pretty decent.
If one culture could speak and did not use hand gestures and another culture did not use symbolic communication but did use hand gestures, then I think the culture that could speak would have a better understanding of learning the hand gesture language. This is because hand gestures you can point out certain things. The hand gesture culture would have trouble speaking because they wouldn’t know what certain things were verbally. So personally I think it would be better to know hand signals but in the long run the culture that was able to speak would be better off.
Part 2:
I am the type of person who uses hand gestures a lot and a lot of expressions when I talk. I am also a very smiley person so this part of the assignment was even harder then the first part! I ended up doing this part with my boyfriend and I used my hands on accident and then I started laughing and my boyfriend thought I was crazy and I ended up only accomplishing like 4 minutes of this part!
I really had a fun time doing this assignment, plus I got a free pair of shoes out of it yay!
I definitely think that people who have adapted to reading body language can almost in a way speak two languages; body language and actually speaking. I think even military and others use sign language when they are in a quite environment. I actually can not think of an environment not to read body language except maybe in a classroom and you are taking a test.
Glad you got a shoe shopping trip out of the assignment! Interesting that your mom took your lack of verbal communication as a sign that something was wrong. What does that tell you?
ReplyDeleteYour comment on the military is very interesting. They do use a lot of sign language in certain circumstances, but when they do use verbal communication during combat, they use straight-forward verbal with essentially no body language included or needed, perhaps to remove the possibility of misunderstanding or misinterpretation?
Great discussion?
I really liked your point of view. You've even persuaded me to think that hand gestures are more helpful to communicate because, if the language is unknown, nothing will ever be solved. but pointing to an object is effective because each culture knows what the object is. out of curiosity, as an expressive and talkative person would you say you read people well? and if so, is it due to connecting with them verbally or taking the time to observe their body language.
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