The United States communication and I

BRUNO MORI
Feb, 01 2004

The United States communication and I
Brazil is the country which I was born, and lived for 18 years. When I was in the first year of high school, my father suggested the idea of studying in the United States. I was very young; I was scared of new things and goals. I wanted to stay in Brazil with my friends and my everyday routine which I was adapted. After high school I realized how easier would be for me to find a job with an American university certificate. Therefore, I came to my father and asked if I still could come to America, he said yes. Communication barriers started to appear since this day. One of the biggest problems that I had in my first year of United States is the challenge of communicating with people.
My personal experiences can prove that the first year living in a country with a different language is hard. Brazil was just the past for me. My Brazilian friends and family were left behind; my routine would have to change even the Brazilian high school that I used to hate wasn’t there anymore. A new life had appeared for me. I had to learn how to walk and especially talk again.
It was hard to keep a conversation flowing with someone in English, therefore; I had no friends during this period. The approach to start a conversation for me was always non-verbal. This is interesting because I had to find another way to communicate with people; asking for a coke and asking for a McDonald’s number 1 were the same expression. In a way this helped me to improve my non-verbal communication; my eye contacts and moves could talk to the world.
On the other hand, I had two barriers that were bothering me. The first one is the Decoding Barrier which happens when the listener can’t understand the message that is being told. The cable TV company must have been happy with me because I paid for fifty channels, but I was only watching cartoons because some cartoons don’t speak so much. When I just arrived here I was taking some English classes; however, the break time was sometimes more helpful then that actual classes. During the class I couldn’t understand almost anything what my Instructor was trying to say.
I was always trying to talk with someone who was usually an International student with the same skill in English as me. After a while I started to decode some what American people were saying, but before I only understood what the Instructor was writing on the blackboard.
The second barrier is the Encoding. My encoding skills were developing slower than my encoding barrier. This means that the speaker is not expressing the message in a right way. After a while I could understand the message but sometimes I couldn’t reply. I am not a very shy person, so I always had lots of friends and always tried to start a conversation with almost anyone. The problems were not start, but keep the conversation going. My encoding was very slow, so while I was trying to encode a message from Portuguese to English the conversation had already changed the topic; I was always lost in a conversation. If more than one person was talking to me I couldn’t say a word because it was too hard for me to encode and decode lots of thing at the same time. Finally my problem was gone it was a miracle I went to sleep and dreamed that I was in United States and everyone and I were speaking English. This is an experience that cannot be explained in short paragraphs something amazing for me. When I woke up I realized a technique to encode and decode faster, the trick was that I needed to learn how to listen and speak English without thinking in Portuguese and translating. My skills improved a lot from the night to the day.
My dream didn’t last forever; encoding created a Social-psychological context barrier that also prejudiced my life in United States. Social-psychological context happens when communication cannot be done because the listener and speaker have social or psychological issues between them. This barrier was very visible on me, as a child in the fist day of school I was scared of American people. As I said all my friends and family I had left in Brazil there was only me and the United States. I had to find new friends having as an advantage that my English skills had improved. I already had some friends who were International students from my English class; also I had some Brazilian friends. However, I wanted more I wanted to hang out with American people learn what they need to teach me and teach what I have to teach about Brazil. I knew it was going to be hard to communicate with Americans, I still couldn’t understand everything that my Instructors were speaking, but talk with an American friend is harder than listen to a lecture. One of my first encounters was in the Smoking area, I talked with an American guy I barely could understand what he was saying, but I tried anyway. I was a little shy when talking with this guy because I was always asking him to repeat, but I think he understood that I was trying to be nice, so he was nice to me. This conversation encouraged me try harder to find some American friends. Therefore, I always asked if my International students’ friends had American friends that I could meet. After this time took me to friends I have today.
Even though I had corrected and prevented my three main barriers one more barrier had appeared I started to talk with American people everyday, so that I felt how different I was from them. My culture is very different the Cultural Context Barrier popped-up. The differences in culture between the people who are communicating can cause barriers that will cause a ”noise” in the message. It is not easy to find someone that knows about the places Brazil, so everywhere that I went someone asked me if I lived in The Amazon Forest. Well, no one instead of Native Brazilians live in there. I live in Sao Paulo a city which is big as New York or L.A., I felt sad about that. Even worse they asked me if I lived in the top a tree. Sounds funny for me today, but during that time of depression and barriers everywhere was terrible. The way that I could separate this problem was that I started making jokes about it that I was really from the jungle and I was very nice to live with the monkeys. Another cultural problem happened because Americans usually don’t use very polite words for instructors and older people. In Brazil it’s even worse. Almost no one calls an Instructor using Mr. or Ms. in the beginning. This caused a problem because someone people thought that I wasn’t being polite to them because most people don’t know about my culture. Sometimes people felt insulted with that.
Today, after three years of American life I adapted myself to the American way to communicate and act. I fell that I belong in Brazil and United States the same time. Sometimes communicating barriers appear to bother me, but I know how to make them leave.