Different Cultures, Different Friendships
ABSTRACT: The world is a mixture of various cultures. However, different cultures may have different concepts of friendship which can cause misunderstandings. This article compares the differences in friendship between Chinese and Western in order to facilitate culture communication and mutual understanding. Friendship is needed everywhere in the world, so it is important to be aware of these differences during the intercultural communication.
Key words: Culture, Friendship, Intercultural Communication
1. Introduction
Nowadays, as contacts between people of different cultural backgrounds become more often and extensive due to globalization, the possibility of forming intercultural friendships has also been greatly increased. Frequent contacts do not necessarily lead to intercultural friendships however. More often than not, these are loosely friendship-like relationships or causal relationships between Chinese and foreigners.
Compared with the large number of my Chinese friends, I have only a very limited number of foreigners as acquaintances and we have little contact with each other. Even my Chinese friends, who are English majors, admit as well that they have few, if any, foreigners as friends. I am perplexed by this fact because common sense argues that since English majors have more opportunities to interact with foreigners and they are relatively knowledgeable about foreign cultures, it should be easier for them to be involved in friendship relations than non-English majors.
Culture is the basis of communication. Goodwin(1999) indicates that across-cultural perspective for studying personal relationships not only benefits the theoretical development of Western research, but also has considerable practical implications for international business and for tourism. In order to reduce or even avoid misunderstanding between people of different cultures, one needs to learn each others cultural norms, including how and when to show appreciation in close relationships. Thus dealing with cultural differences is a major task in Intercultural Communication.
2. Importance of friendship
Different people may prefer to have different friendships in their life. From birth to death, friendship plays an integral part in our life. Friendship is one of the greatest pleasures that people can enjoy. It implies loyalty, cordiality, sympathy, affection and readiness to help. Real friends are those who can share all our sorrows and double all our joys.
Three functions of friendship were identified by Solano(1986). First, friends
meet our material needs. Friends provide various kinds of help and support. Second, friends meet our cognitive needs. Friends provide stimulation in the form of shared experiences, activities, and the lively exchange of gossip and ideas. Finally, friends meet our social-emotional needs through the provision of love and esteem.
Friendship can enhance mutual under-standing among people from different countries(Knapp,1992). Furthermore, friendship fills our life with fullness, fineness and completeness. However, the difficulty when strangers from two countries meet is not a lack of appreciation of friendship, but different expectations about what constitutes friendship and how it comes into being.
3. Friendships in different lands
In the west, it is impolite to ask about a person?s age, marital status, or income. But in China, privacy usually refers to other personal affairs. Likewise, the concept of friendship differs in different cultures.
For Chinese, a true friendship could be kept throughout the whole life. In the discussion of communicative culture, Zhang Zhanyi(1988) stated that the word pengyou, or friend, in Chinese is used only to refer to a person who is known and trusted by the speaker for several years. Chinese people take personal friendship very seriously. One very well known saying in China is ?It is sufficient in life to have a true friend for life?. Chinese people will consider someone a friend even if they haven?t spoken for a long time. If you shared something at one time, then all your life you are friends. Chinese friends share “things in common”，a task, a class, the hometown and so on. Friendships are formed by people who work or go to school together. You may or may not like the person, but if he or she can do something for you because of his position or job, you can be friends.
Most Americans expect their friends to be more dependent and solve their own problems. On the contrary, Chinese friendship needs more obligations. A Chinese may use personal connections to help the friend to get something hard to obtain. A Chinese often provides money to his friend to help him out of difficulties. These rarely happened among the westerners, because this makes a person depend on another one.
One of my schoolmate said that she knew her friend wanted to go shopping, so she just put her own work aside and went shopping with her friend. This is really different from what many American young people think about what the friendship is. In the United States you cannot expect a friend to drop his own things just to do something unimportant with you. You can ask your friend for help, but you should recognize that they may say no to you.
Americans use the word “friend” in a very general way. They may call both casual acquaintance and close companions “friend”. Americans have school friends, work friends, sports friends and neighborhood friends. These friends are based on common interests. When the shared activity ends, the friendship may fade. Studies show that one out of five American families moves every year. American friendships develop quickly, and they may change just as quickly. People from the United States
may at first seem friendly. Americans often chat easily with strangers. They exchange information about their families, hobbies and work. They may smile warmly and say, “Have a good time” or “See you later.” Schoolmates may say, “Let?s get together sometimes” or “Drop in anytime you like.” Often this is just a way to be friendly. It is not always a real invitation. Thus Americans friendliness is not always an offer of true friendship. However, we shouldn?t give up trying to make Americans friends. Show an interest in their culture, their country or their job, for Americans like to talk about themselves. Americans do value strong life-long friendship, even with non- Americans.
English friendships follow still a different pattern. Their basis is shared activity. Activities at different stages of life may be of very different kinds—discovering a common interest in school, serving together in the armed forces, taking part in a foreign mission. Americans who have made English friends comment that, even years later, \are like a couple who begin to dance again when the orchestra strikes up after a pause. English friendships are formed outside the family circle. And a break in an English friendship comes not necessarily as a result of misjudgement, where one friend seriously misjudges how the other will think or feel or act, so that suddenly they are out of step.
For the French, friendship is a one-to-one relationship that demands a keen awareness of the other person's intellect, temperament and particular interests. A friend is someone who draws out your own best qualities, with whom you sparkle and become more of whatever the friendship draws upon. In France, as in many European countries, friends generally are of the same sex, and friendship is seen as basically a relationship between men. They may call one another—copains—a word that in English becomes \eyes this is not friendship, although two members of such a group may well be friends.
In Germany, in contrast with France, friendship is much more clearly a matter of feeling, Adolescents, boys and girls, from deeply sentimental attachments, walk and talk together—not so much to polish their wits as to share their hopes and fears and dreams to form a common front against the world of school and family and to join in a kind of mutual discovery of each other's and their own inner life. Appropriately, in Germany friends usually are brought into the family. Like ties of kinship, ties of friendship are meant to be absolutely binding. Young Germans who come to the United States have great difficulty in establishing such friendships with Americans. Americans view friendship more tentatively, subject to changes in intensity as people move, change their jobs, marry, or discover new interests.
4. Conclusions
What then is friendship? Even simple translation from one language to another is difficult. \—to someone one has
known for a few weeks in a new place, to a close business associate, to a childhood playmate, to a man or woman, to a trusted confidant. A friendship may be superficial, casual, situational or deep and enduring.
In my opinion, a friend is someone who understands your past, believes in your future, and accepts you just the way you are. Each of us is a product of our individual experiences, feelings, ideas, moods, occupation, religion, and so forth. It is important to be aware of the different understanding of friendship in different culture. Knowing these well can we make intercultural communication much easier.
References
严明.大学英语跨文化交际教程.北京:清华大学出版社,2011 许力生.跨文化交际英语教程.上海:上海外语教育出版社,2004
Goodwin,R.(1999). Personal relationships across cultures. New York: Routledge. Knapp, M. L.,& A. L.Vangelisti. Interpersonal communication and human relationships [M] .Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1992, .
Solano, C.H.(1986).People without friends: Loneliness and its alternatives. In V.J. Derlega & B.A. Winstead (Eds.), Friendship and social interaction(pp.227-246). NY: Springer-Verlag.
Zhang,Z.(1988).Discussion of communicative culture. Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association,23(3),107-113.