Product Description

Why do so many women feel that men don't tell them anything, but just lecture and criticise? Why do so many men feel that women nag them and never get to the point? In this pioneering book Deborah Tannen shows us how women and men talk in different ways, for profoundly different reasons. While women use language to make connections and reinforce intimacy, men use it to preserve their status and independence. Some have claimed that conversations are the forum of male power games, but the author suggests that jockeying for attention is not the whole story and that even when domination is the result, it is not always the intention. She shows how many frictions may arise because girls and boys grow up in essentially different cultures. Where women use language to seek confirmation, make connections and reinforce intimacies, men use it to protect their independence and negotiate status. The result is that conversation becomes a cross-cultural communication, fraught with genuine confusion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58579 in Books
• Published on: 1992-03-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 330 pages

Review
'Tannen combines a novelist's ear for the way people speak with a rare power of original analysis ... fascinating' OLIVER SACKS

About the Author
Best-selling author Deborah Tannen is University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She has also been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princetown University.

Customer Reviews

A must for anyone hoping to understand the opposite sex.
"You just don't understand" is a very well written book explaining the differences displayed by men and women in conversation. Some of it is common sense but a lot of what Tannen writes about is very eye-opening and explained a lot to me about how my comments would come across to a man and what his comments might mean. Helped me to believe that men are not simply evil, as one may suspect, they just have different styles of conversation.

Definitive guide to avoiding misunderstandings with the opposite sex
This is one of the most usuful books ever written, and far and away the most helpful I have seen on the topic of how men and woman can understand each other better.

Dr Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics; her first book on the subject of communications was called "That's not what I meant." That book had ten chapters about alternative aspects of differing conversationsal styles and the misunderstandings they can cause: one of those ten chapters dealt with gender differences. But as Dr Tannen explains in the preface to this book, 90% of the feedback and requests for interviews or follow-up articles concerning that first book concentrated on 10% of it - the chapter on male-female differences.

The reason is not hard to seek. Differences in geographical origin, profession, race, class or ethnic background can easily be associated with differing communication styles which can lead to misunderstandings. However, we are not forced to build our most important and intimate relationships with people from whom we have such differences, though some choose to. But none of us can avoid having relationships central to our lives with people of the opposite sex. All of us have one parent of the other gender, the 90% of us who are heterosexuals have to look for our life-partners among the other gender, anyone who has a child has a 50% chance of having to raise someone of the other gender.

So Dr Tannen set out to explore communications and misunderstandings between men and women, and this book was the result.

I had been married less than two weeks when my wife and I managed to almost exactly act out one of the first examples of a male-female misunderstanding given in this book. Dr Tannen had presented in a Washington Post article a real-life conversation between a couple in their car.

The wife had asked "Would you like to stop for a drink?" The husband, taking the question literally and precisely at its face value, answered "No". The woman, who had expected her husband to realise that she did want to stop for a drink, was upset because it appeared to her that he ignored her wishes. The man, when it came out later that his wife was upset by this, was equally frustrated, wondering "Why didn't she just say what she wanted?"

Luckily when my wife and I enacted an almost identical conversation, (substituting a chinese takeaway for a drink) she added the comment "I really fancied a chinese" before it was too late to get one. If I had not read this book I might well have been hurt or confused and asked something like "Why didn't you say so in the first place?" As I had, I recognised at that we had fallen into the same pattern as the example in the book and that the problem was easily rectified; we stopped the car to get the takeaway, and avoided what could have developed into a completely unnecessary row. This was the first of a number of occasions when the book has helped us communicate better.

Dr Tannen is at pains to emphasise that she is not suggesting that men's or women's ways of speaking are necessarily better, just different, and that both sexes will be able to communicate more effectively if they have an understanding of those differences.

This book helped me for one to do that, and I strongly recommend it.

Should be part of the National Curriculum
A fantatstic book which we should all read. Most of the subject matter is so relevent in daily converstation its a must read.

The discussions and examples of the points is extremely interesting and there are 'so' many issues that can be seen in almost every conversation you have ever had.

My only criticism is that its quite heavy going and 'feels' more like a text book - but then again it probably is!

Well worth reading - some if not all.