English blog

Colombia and Brazil have some similarities and differences in non-verbal communication that can be separated in several aspects. In physical contact, Brazilians, like Colombians, stand out for being very tactile and physical contact such as touching the shoulders and arms during communication is normal, gestures are commonly used in both countries, some gestures that are used in Brazil are the rubbing of hands to express indifference or thumbs up to approve, as for the sounds they are frequent in both countries to express emotions and react to situations such as clicking the tongue means disapproval in both countries, finally it should be noted that for Brazilians and Colombians is normal to interrupt during a conversation to express their own point of view.

  If a person from Brazil came to Barranquilla to study, he could encounter problems due to the cultural differences between Colombia and Brazil, even though these countries have a similar culture. One of them would be the different gestures between the populations of these two countries, for example, Brazilians greet each other with kisses while Colombians are more closed in that regard. Another possible problem is that Colombians and Brazilians have a high uncertainty avoidance, therefore they are strict with the rules and laws that protect their traditions and religion because they have a lot of respect for them, which means that they can be closed to the new culture of the country. Finally, another problem that can be found is that Brazil is a country with an intermediate masculinity, so emotional gender differences are not very marked, while Colombia has a high masculinity that means that the differences between gender roles are highlighted.

About Brazil there are several stereotypes of nationality, religion, ethnicity, etc. In this post I am going to talk about 4 of them. The first stereotype is that every Brazilian is dark-skinned. This is false because the culture of Brazil is not completely of one race and is influenced by immigration from Germany, Japan, Africa, among many others. The second stereotype is that Brazil is just jungle. This is not true because although in Brazil the forests are outstanding for their size and biodiversity, this country has more biomes such as the mata atlantica, cerrado, caatinga, pampa and pantanal.  The third stereotype is that most of the Brazilian households are favelas. That is false because the percentage of people that lives in favelas are just the 6% of the population of Brazil although that percentage equates to approximately 11 million people. The last stereotype is that all Brazilians are amazing at football. Despite the fact that soccer is a passion for a large part of the...

 

  Hello everyone, my name is Jhosep Varela and i am from Barranquilla. Right now, i’m studying systems engineering at Universidad del Norte in second semester. I like playing videogames and sports.