'Culture consists of all shared products of human society' (Robertson, 1981 ). This means not only such material things as cities, organizations and schools, but also non-material things such as ideas, customs, family patterns, languages. Putting it simply, culture refers to the entire way of life of a society, 'the ways of a people'. Language is a part of culture and plays a very important role in it. Some social scientists consider it the keystone of culture. Without language, the maintaining of culture would not be possible. On the other hand, language is influenced and shaped by culture, it reflects culture. In the broadest sense, language is the symbolic representation of a people, and it comprises their historical and cultural backgrounds, as well as their approach to life and their ways of living and thinking. We should not go further into the relationship between language and culture. What needs to be stressed here is that the two interact, and that understanding of one requires understanding of the other. Social scientists tell us that cultures differ from one another, that each culture is unique. As cultures are diverse, so languages are diverse. It is only natural then that with differences in cultures and differences in languages, difficulties often arise in communicating between cultures and across cultures. Understanding is not always easy. Learning a foreign language well means more than merely mastering the pronunciation, gram mar, words and idioms. It means learning also to see the world . as native speakers of that language see it, learning the ways in which their language reflects the ideas, customs, and behaviors of their society, learning to understand their 'language of the mind'. Learning a language, in fact, is inseparable from learning its culture. According to the first paragraph, the term 'culture' refers to ______.