Global Business Languages (1997)

When a person wants to learn or is in the process of learning another language, he/she will encounter not only syntactical, semantic, and phonological differences but also cultural ones. These differences can be in the learners themselves, within their business culture, and/or within the new business culture. This article will take a look at how learners and their culture can affect their learning a new language and its business culture. Dilts, Epstein and Dilts point out so clearly that...in our brain structure, language, and perceptual systems there are natural hierarchies or levels of experience. The effect of each level is to organize and control the information on the level be-low it. Changing something on an upper level would necessarily change things on the lower levels; changing something on a lower level could but would not necessarily affect the upper lev-els. (26) At the moment the structure of our brain is clear, but how it exactl