Another thing that fascinates me with different regions of the US as well as other English-speaking countries: Accents and ways of speaking. I personally enjoy them from a curiosity perspective, but I'm afraid to go on about that stuff when meeting, say, someone from the UK. I'm afraid they'd think I'm making fun of them. Southern drawls aren't common around here except in the bottom-most reaches of the state, but we've had people from cities up north like Chicago and Madison say that we have "southern" accents here. Sir/Ma'am, you clearly haven't driven far enough to assume that.
Pronunciation gets interesting, too. Take the word "process", for example. Here, it's commonly pronounced "praw-sess", but I've heard it pronounced "prow-sess".
...I can say that there's something to brainwashing as well. I was following some Unity tutorial videos for a stealth game example in college. The British narrator kept pronouncing the word "inventory" like "in-ven-ter-ee" versus the "in-ven-tor-ee" here. I actually picked up on that way of saying it for awhile and had to keep correcting myself.
Currently playing: Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story + Bowser Jr's Journey, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana (Switch)
I'm an American (New Yorker) living in South Korea. I've been here for almost 7 years now. Before I came to Korea, I never really traveled outside of the US, so I'm sure I had pretty stereotypical views of Europeans just due to general ignorance. But since I moved to Korea, I've had the chance to travel a lot, and it has really broadened my perspective. I've obviously made a bunch of Korean friends, my wife is Chinese, so I've met a lot of Chinese people through her, and Korea has pretty tight expat communities, so I've made close friends from all over the place (namely the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa). My main takeaway is that despite there being some cultural and/or country-specific differences, we mostly just have a ton of stuff in common. I've traveled to Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, China, Greece, and Italy since I've been here, and while it's cool to see different cultures and ways of life in action, when it boils down to it, we're all humans. Cool people are cool people, no matter what country they're from, and similarly, d-bags will be d-bags. I don't know, I just kind of feel like even though we're all different, we're also all kind of the same.
On specific cultural differences, I really have to say that tipping throws me for a loop now. There's no tipping in Korea. It took me a while to get used to it, but now I am. Every time I go back to the US to visit, I always forget to tip someone at least once or twice, and I feel terrible about it. I also didn't know what to do when I was in Europe. I read online that it's still considered good form to tip for good service, so we always did, but I think we went overboard. Got great service at the places we frequented during the trip though!
I am bit late (sorry) but I don't want to miss anything and I'll check everything. I agree. There are some cultural things that affect our points of view (typically religion, politics...) but at the end of the day life and love should be as easy and simple as possible. There are good people all over the world and I will always try to avoid d-bags as much as possible wherever I am. Asia is a very interesting continent to visit and their culture is very different to ours, we can always learn a thing or two from them and share, which was my intention since the beginning, basically.
As a said earlier, tipping in Europe depends on the type of restaurant, service and value so you weren't doing wrong.
@Link-Hero I think that you can say your opinion about religions, the problem was that a person attacked other people personally and aggressively right from the start but as long as we understand that every one of us has a different opinion which is based on our own experiences and life everything should be fine. I believe in most of us.
Forums
Topic: How Americans are? Tell an European.
Posts 141 to 142 of 142
This topic has been archived, no further posts can be added.