【推荐1】Your action can speak louder than your words. It is important to know another language and how to communicate without words when you are in another country. Before saying anything, people communicate with each other by using gestures(手势). However, many gestures have different meanings, or no meaning at all, in different parts of the world.

In the United States, nodding your head up and down means “yes”, while in some parts of Greece and Turkey, it means “no”. In the southeast of Asia, it is a polite way of saying “I heard you”.

Today in the USA, when someone puts his thumb(大拇指) up, it means “Everything is all right.” However, in Greece it is bad manners to do so. Also putting your clasped(紧握的)hands up above your head means “I am the winner.” It is the sign which players often make. In Russia it is the sign of friendship.

In the USA, holding your hand up with the thumb and index finger(食指)in a circle, and the other three straight means “Everything is OK.” In France, it means “You are worth nothing.”

It is also important to make eye communication. If you look down when talking to an American, he or she may feel that you are shy, or you are trying to hide something.

Besides these, you should also know there are some topics that can not be talked about, such as age, weight and marriage. You can talk about the weather, work, sports, food, where one lives and news of the day.

【推荐3】The unusual whistle language used as a means of communication by villagers in the remote and mountainous northern Turkey has been added to the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The language is a highly developed high-pitch system of whistling to communicate in rugged areas where people mostly cannot see each other. It can allow people to communicate across great distances, up to 5 kilometers. Compared with other similar whistle languages in Spain's Canary Islands, in Mexico, or in Greek villages, it has a higher tone and larger vocabulary.

This unusual form of communication, which dates some 500 years ago, to the Ottoman Empire, was born from sheer necessity and widespread across the Black Sea regions.

But 50 years ago, the bird language suffered greatly due to the impact of the progression of technology and nowadays the rapid growth of cellular mobile systems has put this cultural heritage under serious threat.

For centuries, the language has been passed on from grandparent to parent, from parent to child. Now, though, many of its most skilful speakers who use their tongue, teeth and fingers are aging and becoming physically weak. Young people are no longer interested in learning the language or in finding ways to update its vocabulary with new words, and in a few generations it may be gone for good.

“Our bird language is very convenient and efficient to communicate across the valleys. It has many benefits over yelling, which is bad for our throats.” said Avni Kocek, head of the bird village adding that despite setbacks because of technology, “Bird language is still used by many of us. Whistle language is transmitted from our elders to us and we have the duty to transmit it to our children. We are making efforts to keep our culture alive through the yearly Bird Language Festival.”

Besides, the bird language has been required to be taught at primary schools since 2014 by district authorities in order to put the practice in younger generations.

【推荐1】Taking photographs at a birthday or a wedding has become as natural as blowing out candles or cutting the cake. But our obsession (痴迷) with recording every detail of our happiest moments could be damaging our ability to remember them, according to a new research. A study has shown that taking pictures rather than concentrating fully on the events in front of us prevents memories taking hold.

Dr. Linda Henkel, from Fairfield University, Connecticut, described it as the “photo-taking impairment effect”. She said: “People so often pull out their cameras almost mindlessly to capture a moment, to the point where they are missing what is happening right in front of them. When people rely on technology to remember for them—counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves—it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences.”

Dr. Henkel and her team carried out an experiment in a museum, to learn if taking pictures of the exhibits was hindering(阻碍)the ability of visitors to remember what they had seen.

A group of university students were led on a tour at the Bellarmine Museum of Art at Fairfield University and were asked to either photograph or remember objects on display. The next day their memory was tested. The results showed that people were less accurate in recognizing the objects they had photographed than those they had only looked at. It was found that their memory for the details of the objects they had photographed was poorer.

Henkel’s lab is currently investigating whether the content of a photo, such as whether you are in it, affects later memory. She is also researching whether actively choosing what to photograph might influence what we remember.

Previous research suggests that reviewing photos we have taken does help us remember the objects, but only if we take the time.

“Research has suggested that the sheer volume and lack of organization of digital photos for personal memories discourages many people from accessing and recalling them. In order to remember, we have access and interact with the photos, rather than just collect them,” said Dr. Henkel.