But a quick, discreet look at another table taught me that it was there to wash my hand after the meal, and. But that metal bowl with warm water that showed up at my table was not in any manuals I read. I knew from prior research that in India you eat with the right hand, sometimes without a fork or a spoon. So, how do you deal with this? By paying attention to what is going on. It can be difficult to know what you don’t know, to imagine that something that is so natural, so instinctive at home can be at odds with local mores. So when came the time to exchange business cards, I knew what the 'procedure' was: start with the senior person first (follow others’ gaze when in doubt), bow, and offer the card with two hands, writings facing your counterpart, while reciting something pretty elaborate in Japanese. This is exactly what I did before I went for the first time to Japan. But this served me as a reminder: I should have prepared better by reading about local customs before landing in Kuala Lumpur. Instant awkward moment!įortunately, she chose not to hold it against me. I met a government official-and greeted her by shaking her hands. The basics of what constitutes good manners may be similar from one culture to the next but these basics are heavily colored by local customs.įor example, one day, I traveled to Malaysia. That is clearly an important topic, but it is also quite a wide one. Sitting on a Turkish Airlines flight that will first take me to Istanbul back from Prague, somewhere over the Carpathian mountains, I pondered about manners while conducting business abroad. If you make a mistake, confess it and you shall be forgiven Manners Matter - Even If You Ain't Perfect So, go ahead and work on these: merci, danke sh¸ön, xiexie, arigatou, terima khasi, and of course d ěkuji! And since I just boarded a Turkish Airlines: Tesserkular! Locals will usually still appreciate the gesture. Just to learn a word, or two, or three.Īnd if you end up mangling these words beyond recognition, that is OK. But again, the goal is not to turn you into a native speaker overnight. On the other hand, learning languages from a different family-Turkish, Hungarian (which is not an Indo-European language)-or that use a different writing system (Chinese, Arabic) would be more challenging. And if that language is in the same family as yours (Czech is an Indo-European language, like English, French, Russian, and also Hindi), then it may even be possible to pick up additional words on your own through similarities, even basic syntax. Talking about effort, how difficult is it, really? Well, if your target language uses the same writing system as you use in your own, it will probably feel easier. Your hosts are paying attention to the effort you put in, but they are not expecting an infrequent visitor to master their language. but perfection is NOT required in order to be effective. Only in the end, when someone answered "thank you" back at me in Czech, did I notice I butchered the language for days! The result? The smiles and the prosim kept on coming. Unfortunately, after a day or two, my pronunciation started drifting. Which earned me smiles, usually followed by prosim-please!-uttered in a more or less official tone. So I started using this word in my daily interactions with hotel staff, restaurant waiters, and so on. Ouch, I thought: how am I supposed to pronounce that accent on the 'e'? Fortunately, Google told me at a click of a button ('djyekuyi'). So upon landing here, I opened my cell phone and asked how to say "thank you" in Czech. Those of you that know me personally or follow me on LinkedIn know I am dabbling in a few languages-French, English, Chinese, some Japanese.īut one language that I do NOT know much about is Czech, which is the local tongue in Prague. If you bump into someone, can you apologize in the local tongue? A Local Thank You Is Appreciated - Even When Butchered
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