Intercultural Communication Breakdown

One intercultural communication breakdown I experienced happened last semester in a marketing class I took. In this class, there were many international students, and for one of our main projects we were all assigned to random groups. I was in a group with three other student, and two were international. One groups member was from Mexico and the other was from China. When our group first met to simply introduce ourselves, we even had trouble pronouncing each others names and trying to arrange a time to have weekly meetings. When we did have our weekly meetings, often when we were discussing the project the international students would have to spend extra time trying to make their point because they could not find the words they wanted to use as easily in english. Our one group member from China would often type into his phone what he was trying to tell us and translate it into english. This language barrier was very difficult when trying to collaborate on a cohesive paper and presentation. All the group members wanted to contribute and help one another, but it was hard to communicate when two of our group members native languages were Spanish and Chinese. By the end of the project we were much better at understanding each other, and helping each other communicate, but it was still difficult to be able to fully explain what we wanted.