Several Cultural Mistakes in Foreign Language Communication

Culture and language are both products of hum an society. This paper concerns the close relationship betweelanguage and culture. Some social scientists consider that language is the keystone of culture. Language is a media of communicationwhich is culturally conditioned. Culture, as a significant feature of human society and the soil for language emergence as well abackground for language use, is closely knitted together with language. However, current teaching syllabus in China does noprovide a system of the specific cultural contents to be included in any teaching program. Culture as a set of traits is by and largeneglected area and has drawn little attention. According to a famous professor Hu Wenzhongs paper, more than 90% students admithat there is a cultural gap between native English speakers and Chinese English learners and all of them think that awareness ocultural difference should be made a goal in language learning and teaching. In intercultural communication, culturamisunderstanding is often worse than linguistic one and tend to create ill feeling between native speakers and Chinese speakers oEnglish. Therefore, cultural mistakes as well as linguistic mistakes should be avoided in order to be successful in inter culturacommunication.