International Communication: Listen Carefully

"Okay, something else you want to do when you are communicating with people from other cultures is you want to listen very, very carefully. Listen to what the person is saying and also listen to the entire message. Don't determine three or four words into it that, "Oh, I know what they're talking about. I know how to answer this." The reason that this is so important is because word choices -sometimes words mean something different in different cultures and different languages- and you also are usually dealing with an accent, and that can change and enhance what words sound like. I know, for example in America, here we say "garage", well the same word over in the UK is "garage", or I would say "I'm going to process your application", in the UK they would say "I'm going to process your application." So you must listen very carefully to the entire message to determine exactly what is being said."