issue 63 求修改(红色是改正后的拼写错误）

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TOPIC: ISSUE63 - "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."

the claim made by author can be drawn as one's profound understanding of one own culture can be achieved by one's familiarity of another culture that is distinct from the original one. i partially agree with the notion though i doubt if it is the only way to facilitate the understanding.

by comparing the distinctly different cultural system, one can make a better judgment of the pros and cons within one's native cultural system. the vivid example is nowadays education system including both the higher education institutions like colleges or universities and the fundamental education schools such as the elementary or high schools , is encouraging the multi-cultural communications by sending the faculties or students abroad or just by absorbing or inviting the foreign students to study in or the famous researchers to give reports to the native schools. the most famous colleges in the world are all those schools with the combination of faculties and students with different races , nationalities, cultural backgrounds, languages, and even religious beliefs. it is by through highly interactive communications one can best differentiate and discriminate the distinct characters of either one's own or the others' cultural systems and thus can be much more likely to grasp the very essence of one's cultural system by being acknowledged where is the weak point and where is the strong point.

considering the function of multi-culturalism does not necessarily mean that it is the only way to dig up the truth of one's own culture.
there are others means to facilitate us in understanding our tradition, modes of behavior, language systems, ethnic culture, without knowing the distinct different one. for instance, in archaeology, the specialists shall travel to the different areas of one nation to explore all the archaeological artifacts and interpret the history and tradition of the different branches under the major cultural trees.
Even though, without knowledge of the histories of other nations, for example, the western countries, the Chinese archaeologists can also do well in their domain to return the past one region's geographical features and the vivid history to our modern society and people.

concerning on the popularity of the notion of multi-culturalism, it is undergoing a dangerous possibility of losing one own cultural identity by the great power of cultural homogenization. due to the political or economic privileges of some nations, those nations with a less desirable status in politics or economy, though owning distinct cultural characters are just undermined by the corruption of the external cultural storms. taking the US's native culture for example, the Indian culture which used to dominate all the continents of the North American Land, has undergone a great regress or even diminished nowadays. though, the underlying reason may partially be due to the invasion of the early European settlers, the destructive power of the so-called mainstream cultural encroachment could not be dismissed. the same thing happens in the far-away distance of the oriental countries. Nowadays, Chinese society is suffering a broken balance of the two distinct cultural systems, saying the native one and the distinctly different one from the western world. in stead of being strengthened by the later, Chinese traditional culture is under a severe depression and obliteration. this can be seen extremely in cases on the youngsters that born after 80s or 90s. if being asked to name several festivals that come out in the minds, more of them tend to resort to the Valentine's Day, the Halloween, rather than the native festivals such as the festival of Lantern or the Spring Festival.

to sum up, to better understand the uniqueness of one's own culture , it should be one of the ways to resort to the total different culture for comparison. however, considering it a only way and put much higher emphasis on the multi-culturalism may ultimately lead into one's self-abnegation of the native culture.