Intercultural communication

I used to attend a MOOC course from Shanghai International Studies University, which was called "Intercultural communication".

I haven't finished it yet; in fact after I finished week 3 out of 5, I had decided that I lost something.

Hard to describe what exactly I lost, but it began to seem for me that I was missing the point, and I decided to take a break and to start again later.
But something I already found interesting.

In those three weeks they showed many challenging cases of miscommunication and they described the reasons.

I also liked a few tricks which they show too.
For instance, a simple question, who are you, can lead to many different types of answers:
- I am Ivan, I am from Russia
- I am a christian
- I am a sculptor

And it shows us different approach, different balance between commonality and differentiation from people of different cultures and origins.

As far as I noticed, they didn't mention the language barrier too much, they set it out of the box.

In ideal circumstances when the language doesn't lead to misunderstanding anyway our different background is enough reason to make a problem.

Since we are intercultural community without any borders, it might happen with us too.

Do you have some fun or educational example of such cultural misunderstanding? Can you share it?