Technology As Innovator

Reflective listening is an inter-personal skill that has been written by many authors in books, journals and articles.
I hereby put a focus on reflective listening when replying to messages via Internet-based media. It can be either replying to a personal email, or replaying a post in a forum, or commenting a blog entry.

I am able to see two parts in a message: the meaning and the expectation. Apparently, people post on forums and blogs with a hope that their readers will read, understand, sympathize and respond in the ‘right’ way.
However, my observations point out that the responders have the temptation to respond in their own way – with what they were able to see. The ‘real’ message and feelings the initiator conveys are easily lost.

Improving the skill in replying and commenting is improving interpersonal skills. How to improve reflective listening is a complete topic of its own and can easily be searched for. The purpose of this piece of writing is just to increase the awareness of communicators (including myself) of how we can constantly improve our communication in the right way.

A simple reminder: communicatioN, not communicationS!

It’s easy to interchange communicationS for communicatioN.

Communication is the very human interaction of exchanging information and knowledge. Communications are tools that help reducing the geographical difference for transmitting data and information.

It is a mistake to invest a lot in technology without encouraging open communication between people in an organization. It is also a mistake to heavily rely on communication tools like Internet-based and cellphone-based activities rather than ‘frictional’ interactions.

We are human. Technology is invented to assist, not replace.

Written for Gideon Schipper

“Why are there so many foreign words in your Vietnamese conversations?”

It reminds me to trace back to hundred years ago, when the French brought the bicycle to Vietnam. It was the first time ever Anamneses witness a new concept: b-i-c-y-c-l-e. We never had known what it was so the French words were taken to name these objects: pê-đan (pedal), ghi-đông… Yes, we have the corresponding Vietnamese words for these objects, but the Vietnamese versions are seldom used.

Hundred years later, this habit still occurs. One specific case: reminder. The Vietnamese word is nhắc. I always ask my mom “Mẹ nhớ nhắc con dạy em học” (Mom, please remind me to tute sis). What in my mind was the action of one person reminds another person. I never knew that the machine can do the reminding action. The first time I interacted with the Remind function done by a machine was in 2006 with MS Outlook, when Phuong asked me to set a personal reminder. It was the first time I encounter the concept of “a machine reminds a person”, and the context was totally in English. The word “reminder” was written into my mind and I never bothered remembering the Vietnamese word “nhắc”. The next times, I always use “reminder” in my conversations.

It happens for many terminologies like Software Design, Architecture etc.

Now, let’s take another example. When I talk to a Designer, I say “Anh DBA chưa vô” (The DBA hasn’t come yet). The corresponding phrase for DBA in Vietnamese is “người quản lý hệ thống cơ sở dữ liệu”. But if I speak “Anh quản lý hệ thống cơ sở dữ liệu chưa vô”, it’ll take the other speaker a few seconds to try to translate the word back to English to be able to understand.

It’s a habit of using the original terminologies as standard without translating to Vietnamese.

And yes, I admit it’s a bad habit. It spoils the transparency of Vietnamese – our mother tongue.

Solution? Either I’ll try to translate each word into Vietnamese and it’ll waste the time of all parties in a conversation or I’ll speak English entirely.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, language is a tool for communication. When the message is properly delivered, the purpose of communication is fulfilled. It’s a trade-off, we accept the usage of foreign words in our daily conversation to save time of translation and translation standardization.

Does it create a bad image of us Vietnamese?