Non-verbal Communication
Non-verbal communication is always used by all of people in this world to communicate their idea or opinion and also expression. Some ways to show the non-verbal communication is by doing hand gesture, face expression, body gesture, or some symbols.
I’ve interviewed my new friend, Hugh, from Melbourne. We’ve compared some hand gestures. In my community, the community of Balikpapan students in Jogja, there are no special way to say something which means not really bad. For example:
A: “How’s the food? Good?”
B: “Yeah, Pretty good.”
But, my friend said that in his country or culture there’s a way to show it. So they are waving their side of their hand up and down. And also their faces are wrinkling. This gesture can be an answer of a question about the taste of something. The answerer can replace the words, so if you don’t answer it by words people will still understand what you mean.
The other difference is people in Australia want to end something, such as conversation or show or performance, they can cross their hands with the each side of the wrist meets and then they do like throwing it forward. It also can be an answer even the speaker doesn’t speak something, as long as they mean to end something. So far, I don’t find any gestures like that in my community. So if we want to stop it, we just raise our hand as high as your shoulder and we push it forward.
In funeral, in Indonesia, people commonly will use the flag, whether it is yellow, black, white, green, etc, to show that in this place there’s a funeral. It’s different in Melbourne. They don’t show any flag or symbol for this case. They only will wear black clothes to show their condole.
Similarity of body gestures in both two different cultures is giving a warning of something to younger. We just raise the index finger and followed with the face expression, sometimes our eyes wider than normal. The other similarity is to show that something is okay or doing well. We just raise the thumb, and sometimes followed by word “okay”.
