63.To truly understand your own culture—no matter how you define it—requires personal knowledge of at least one other culture, one that is distinctly different from your own.
I strongly agree that to truly understand own culture requires personal knowledge of different cultures. Along with the development of globalization of economy, the phenomena of harmonization of culture becomes more and more normally. Studying other different cultures can help us to realize the matters and values of our culture more better.
In the first place, only comparing with other cultures, we can find out the difference between our culture and other cultures, then we can know the real meaning of our own culture. Just like people, without comparing with other people, we do not know a man's disadvantages and regard him as a perfect man. It is well known that Chinese culture has different with western culture, for example, western people believe the Christianism while Chinese people prefer the Buddhism, the two believes' connotation is thoroughly different. Christianism encourages people to love and commiserate other people and animals while Buddhism requires people to tolerate and obey. So these two cultures lead different attitudes and belief of people in different places.
In the second place, there are many influences between different cultures. Because the origin and development of cultures in different countries is relevant, studying other cultures help us to comprehend the background of own culture and we also can find out the commonness between different cultures. For example, there are many similar aspects in Chinese culture and Korean culture including the pronunciation of language, some customs and so on. It reveals the relationship of two cultures and there must have association between China and Korea in ancient time. So Chinese people can acquire information from Korean culture and Korean people may find the lacuna of own culture from Chinese culture two. Therefore it is important and useful to study and know other cultures.
Admittedly, studying other cultures and knowledge does not mean to accept all the information-including good and bad information-and deny our own culture. Because of different cultures, customs, and style of lives in different countries, one culture can not be fit thoroughly for another culture. Moreover, different cultures have different advantages and characteristics, we only can find and study the fit and acceptable information and discard the draff of other cultures so that we can develop our culture more fast and thoroughly.
In sum, from what has been discussed above, we may draw the conclusion that we can study other cultures selectively in order to solidify and develop our own culture. And this also helps us to recognize our culture's disadvantage so that it is convenient for us to make our culture more perfect and appropriate for our people.