【English Composition Practice Book】What is the communication ataxia that skimp on the extra effort?
Uchida Tatsuru, professor emeritus at Kobe College, contributed an article titled "What are communication skills?" to his blog "Uchida tatsuru's Laboratory" (December 29, 2013).
In it, Uchida writes about an exchange he had with a cashier at a supermarket in a provincial city in France when he bought a mug.
When he went to the register, the female clerk asked him something.
It was a word that sounded vaguely familiar, but he didn't know what it meant.
He asked "Huh? What is it?" again, but still didn't know.
After asking "Huh?" two or three times, the clerk seemed to give up, shrugged her shoulders, and began to wrap up the mug.
(omitted)
It was at this point that I dared to lean over to the cashier and utter each word in a broken sentence to the female clerk who shrugged her shoulders, and the meaning of the unintelligible word was revealed to me.
This is “communication ability.
Customers do not usually do this at the checkout counter.
The clerk, sensing that I was a foreigner unfamiliar with French business practices, told me why he was asking for my zip code to buy a mug.
Such things are not usually done by clerks at checkout counters.
I appreciated the fact that she took the trouble to explain it to me.
This is “communication skills” on her part.
In other words, communication ability is not the ability to communicate smoothly, but the ability to get out of a situation when communication has gone wrong.
Later, Uchida gives an example of when he was shopping for dinner ingredients at a Japanese supermarket, and when he went to pay at the register, a young male store clerk called out to him, "Holesja, goryoska."
Not understanding what this meant, he asked "Huh?" several times, and on the third time he realized it meant, "Would you like an ice pack?"
Everyone has experienced the “misunderstanding” caused by a poor tongue, but when a customer asks you back, you can simply say, “Would you like some refrigerant to cool down your perishable food? Most Japanese would understand that “horeza” means “refrigerant” if the word “cool” comes first.
Uchida says.
His unwillingness to take the time to do this is the reason for his poor "communication skills," but this cannot be said to be a personal quality of his.
He went on to say that perhaps the custom of such "rephrases" being acceptable (for him as a store employee) at his own risk is not part of the store's business practices, or that they believe that true service is achieved when the same response is given at every chain store across Japan (a manual for dealing with customers), and that this is the main cause of the "communication breakdown" that has gripped modern Japanese society.
【参考図書】
「日本人のための英作文練習帳」酒井文秀(著)GregoryAlanDick(英文監修)
「[必修編] 英作文のトレーニング」Z会編集部(編)
「自由英作文編 英作文のトレーニング 改訂版」成田あゆみ(著)
「実戦編 英作文のトレーニング 改訂版」Z会編集部(編)
「[はじめる編] 英作文のトレーニング 新装版」渡辺寿郎(著)
