I’d say language is a way for people to communicate with others, such as passing stories to others, telling others what to do, or sharing ideas with others. Culture is a set of values and social norms that a society as a whole holds. Culture and language often go hand in hand, as people who have their own culture often have their own language, or dialect of a language. For me, I’m Chinese born American, but the two cultures are somewhat separate for me, as I’ll go home to a Chinese immigrant family, but spend my time as an American outside of my family. At home, I’ll primarily speak Chinese, but I’m not too good at it so I’ll sprinkle in some English. Meanwhile, my parents speak only Chinese, which helps illustrate a cultural difference between us. I’ve been spoken to slowly before, since my parents have pretty heavy Chinese accents. I guess this is a misconception about Chinese immigrants, and that they don’t have a great understanding of English, despite how it’s my primary language. They see I’m Chinese, so they assume that I don’t have a great grasp of English.

Generally, I think I’m good at interacting across cultures, since I need to do it on a daily basis at home. My high school was also incredibly diverse, so I could interact with a lot of different cultures that way too. However, I don’t know the societal norms of every single culture, so for example nodding my head is fine in America, but it might be derogatory in a foreign culture. So this challenge would probably be that it’s impossible to understand every single culture, so you don’t always know if others will understand what you’re doing.