A Need to Relearn the Culture and the Language

I was visiting a caucasian friend, whose caregiver was a Filipino lady. He was, at that time, having his bath, and the Filipino caregiver, who taught in high school before moving over to the US, was at the kitchen putting stuff in the dishwasher. Moments later, my friend said, "Could you please hand me the towel (TOU-al)?"

The caregiver responded, "What?"

"Please hand me the towel."

"Ah, TAWEL (TA-well)," the caregiver repeated the word with emphasis.

My friend said, "What?"

"TAWEL", she said.

My friend was laughing even before he had his towel, especially that the lady insisted that her pronunciation was correct. "I know it, because I was a high school English teacher before I came here."

Learning the culture and the language when working cross-culturally are essential for effective communication. One way of learning them correctly is to consider ourselves a complete stranger, so that the learning process would not be affected by what we already learned. The lady thought that her pronunciation was correct, because that's how she used to pronounce it back home. Unfortunately, she failed to remember that she was interacting with a native English speaker.

Alright, it is difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, but with open-mind and willingness to swallow our pride, we still can learn properly the new tricks of learning something.


(Note: The scenario is one of the observations included in my research on cross-cultural caregiving)