Noting that intercultural understanding is a prime construct in the study of intercultural communication, this paper examines two questions that confront all intercultural communication researchers: (1) What are the underlying characteristics of intercultural understanding? and (2) What constitutes an interpretative perspective to intercultural understanding? The paper addresses the first question through a discussion of the importance of acquiring the implicit, taken-for-granted knowledge structures that influence everyday conversational usage in a culture. It argues that to understand the relationship between culture and everyday communication conduct, researchers must understand concepts such as cultural conversational pathway, the preferable mode of interaction, the manner of delivery, and turn-taking conversational rules in conjunction with appropriateness of context. In addressing the second question, the paper argues for an ethnographic coherence approach to elicit and simultaneously evoke a system of sociocultural meanings of a speech community. (FL)