Spoken Discourse

I keep charring my cultural differentness between Singapore and Sweden. The class this week actually cleared up some of my experience here in Singapore.
When I moved to Singapore the first thing I had to do was find an apartment. Me and my now being flat mates called like 100 different agents about flats. And the thing we noticed as different (weird) was that everyone just answered the phone – Hello. If I would have done that in any one of my different jobs in Sweden my boss would fired me or at least shout at me for like 15 minutes. In Sweden you have to, at least in the jobs I had, say: The Company’s name, your name and sometimes even the buildings name or the name of the street. So, now I can tell my flat mates that the agents not were rued to us because we called from an oversea phone number, they were just answering their phones the Singaporean way.

Speech events

So, last week’s class was about speech events and I learned that if a guy from Japan ask me to marry him and I don’t want to I have to say no and not just be quiet, because in that case I will end up married. I really enjoyed this class and I realized that communication studies just get you more confuse than before, but in a good way. I mean, this weekend I was speaking in the phone with my dad and I was explaining for him what courses I`m taking and what they are about. When I was telling him that I`m taking a few classes in communication, he ask me why? What is it you can study about communication? it´s just talking? When he asks me that I realized that I would have requested the same question two years ago before I started study it. I think that, people think, communication could not be an issue before them starts to reflect what communication really is about. And the more you analysis communication, the more complicate and complex it gets. So I discovered that communication is so much more than just talking.

Speech act

I think that the class about speech act was really interesting. Before this class I didn’t think that you for example can respond to a compliment in so many different ways. Because in Sweden we uses compliments a lot and everyone is, most of the time, just accepting it. I think it the reason to that are that our parents are complimenting us a lot when we are kids and then everyone gets use to it and keep complementing etch other. I think give complements as much as people do in Sweden is both good and bad. It’s good because it helps you feel better about yourself and it helps you groove as a person. But it could also have negative effect like if you not getting complements for something that you were expecting a complement fore, it will in that case instead result that you feel bad and insecure about yourself. Something in between is always the best. Looking forward to see you all in class tomorrow.