【Talk about English】 我们究竟是什么 (Episode7-5/5)

英语自学网

喜欢独处还是群居？你来自哪个文化群体？本期主播Marc Beeby这次会带领我们一起探究这个主题，一起来听听吧。
       
       

20110705459243621330.jpg

Hints:
        James Keegan
        Mahmoud Jamal
         
        英式拼写
全文听写
People within these collective groups get to understand each other's personalities, each other's roles in that group and they begin to communicate intuitively. Silence is much more an integral part of this kind of group because people know what's going on in another person's mind, you don't have to say everything that you're thinking. Communication amongst individuals in individualist societies tends to be quite verbal, you explain your feelings, what your opinion is is important and silence is in some ways quite embarrassing.
I think Westerners, and I'll include Europeans in general in this, you know, we don't like silences. We have to fill things in, particularly here in the United States, we begin to get edgy, we begin to want an answer immediately. Other cultures do observe a formality. We're an informal society. In order to achieve your own individual purposes, you have to establish very quick relationships. And an example of that of course is how quickly we use first names. We know people and we treat them as if they were real long-time friends, and we've known them two minutes.
Professor James Keegan. It's very important when talking about individualism and collectivism to remember that these are very broad categories. In fact, they are really the two extreme ends of a long line. No culture really falls at either end. Cultures tend towards one end or the other. So where does your culture fall along the line? Do you belong to a more individualist, or more collectivist culture? We'll help you answer that question by looking at more of the differences between the two in our next programme. But I'll leave you with a final word from Mahmoud Jamal.