And people who aren’t part of any of these, do you think you are “missing” something?
Absolutely! A lot of an country’s or region’s culture and history is reflected in their language. In their expressions, vocabulary, loan words, etc.
Definitely. I spent several years living in a South American country, one that is considered almost “high income” for the region. Uruguay. Now back in the States I still recognize how much less we USA folks could live on if our society was not so pushed by constant consumption by the corporatocracy’s propaganda.
Learning to think in another language. Learning how even everyday things like doors and locks are different. Feeling distant from yet also slowly growing into that new to me culture
Smaller space, more use of renewables for heat, cooking, electric generation. Smaller cars than the giants on US roads that everybody here seems to “need”. Yet many of those very small cars are indeed USA street legal if Hyundai/KIA, GM, etc imported the Brasil-Made Chevrolet Onyx, the Argentina-made small Chevrolets, the South American KIA Picanto, VW “city car” the Volkswagen Up! (Already on EU streets in an even smaller version)
Grocery stores with more home made and store made products. Yet without the massive duplication we have of entire aisles of breakfast cereals, soaps, etc. There was a reasonably broad degree of consumer choices but not the overwhelming and ridiculous amount here.
People shopping in small amounts for what they need that day. Rather than huge hauls from Costco?
And the universal and affordable healthcare. Which was not the single-payer free-at-service nonsense that some US politicians claim everywhere in the world’ has. (Dear Bernie, NOBODY in the world has that!) Paid out of your local social security tax equivalent if employed, or about $60 US per month to buy into it if neither employed nor on benefits. Small “ticket charges” for physicians, labs, imaging, and about a $40 US ticket charge for the hospital ER. ZERO charge for hospital stay and all labs, tests, etc during that stay.
Mandatory voting with real competing parties and coalitions of parties. Military used almost only for UN peacekeeping.
There were frustrating times, and I personally had family reasons to return. But I still miss it, and sometimes envy those of my Uruguayan friends who could afford to travel to the US and my US friends that could afford homes in Uruguay while keeping a home also in the US.
One learns in ones bones that the US way is not the only way.
Brazilian here, your point about cars is very nice, but, as much as compact hatches are still the biggest sellers, Brazil has unfortunately been suffering very hard with the whole “SUVfication” bullshit. It’s to the point where some car manufacturers will just make a small hatch family car slightly larger, give it like 3 more inches of ground clearance, somewhat bigger wheels, and then call it an SUV, and all the soccer moms flock to it like lemmings (this is the entire philosophy behind the Renault Kardian. It’s literally just a Gen III Dacia Sandero with different body panels and lights that is a little taller off the ground).
The grocery thing is probably the universal experience when moving from a country where the average person has a high disposable income to low. There are simply more choices.
The grocery thing is probably the universal experience when moving from a country where the average person has a high disposable income to low. There are simply more choices.
I mean, if you are traveling as a tourist, things seem cheap, but to a local who works there, maybe not.
Westerners always say China is very cheap to visit, but as a former Guangzhou resident, when I was a kid, my parents had to work all the time and I rarely got to spend time with them. And we lived in a very shitty slum neighborhood. Locals don’t really share the same experience.
I think the people who are on work visas are just doing English teaching, very comfortable job, or maybe even some “White Monkey Job” that pays a lot.
Most Chinese people cannot teach English… so there’s that…
Wait I thought this was about Brazil and the USA. I know there are shopping malls in some big tier one cities that are primarily aimed for tourists and that’s another story but I meant local grocery stores outside the big cities and then compare that between Brazil and USA or some other lower disposal income country than the US
If you mean that “thinking” in another language influences things like your outlook and even reaction to things… you’d be correct. It’s been studied and documented that with every language you learn, you also get something of a personality upgrade that comes with being able to understand and convey concepts specific to that language.
It’s not exactly as elaborate as gaining an whole new pov, but it’s nonetheless similar.
Learning a second language sorta unlocked a new ‘personality’ for me, it’s kinda weird and was pretty huge. My third language didn’t seem to change much? Though it might be because it was german and I don’t feel like I will ever truly master it
Spouse is Kenyan and I have learned a fair bit of Swahili. My spouse is fluent in English, Swahili, and their tribal language which I know basically none of.
I never could have imagined how much it would help me understand them better by understanding their language. It has profoundly changed me as a person.
Language is not purely functional, it is woven into who we are and how others perceive us to be. I started learning to simply participate more with them and their family, now I am experiencing my brain be rewritten.
As a person who only spoke English well into adulthood and then is rapidly learning a very different language and culture, I feel like I have a POV that nobody else in my life understands.
Thanks for asking :)
Yes.
When talking with the average American back home, there are lots of things you can sense they don’t notice and don’t seem to think about, especially if they’ve never even travelled.
From small things like always being cognizant of time zone differences and phone number country codes you use, to bigger things like seeing how crappy American restrictive zoning laws, suburban hellscapes, and car-centric society are.
Also, from the weeb perspective, going from needing anime subtitles to almost not needing them is pretty interesting.
Also, from the weeb perspective, going from needing anime subtitles to almost not needing them is pretty interesting.
Japanese too hard. I gave up. 😭
Japanese speaking and listening is still harder than reading and writing for me, and I’m guessing it’s the same for you, since you already know 漢字?
I can hear some Japanese words because Cantonese (and sometime Mandarin) has some overlap sounds with Japanese.
In Steins;Gate for example: Japanse pronounciation for WW3 (第三次世界大戦) is “Daisanji sekai taisen”, Cantonese is “Daisaamchi saigaai daaizin”, so when that character said those words, I was momentarily confused, like: why is there Cantonese in my Anime?, but then I realized, both probably derived from the same common anestral language, probabky some merchants traveled from the 粵 (Yue) region of China to Japan or vice versa, and that’s probably how these pronunciations influenced each other.
Aye, that’s it.
You can hear it in some words like 日本, as ‘nippon’ and ‘Japan’ both feel closer to the Middle Chinese pronunciation than they are to modern Mandarin’s ‘rìběn’.
Also, I hear Chinese students unintentionally (or half-intentionally) slip in Mandarin pronunciations all the time when they forget the Japanese pronunciation that is very close.
Diversifying your means of understanding can feel really rewarding(and challenging).
As for missing something…I think we overestimate how much language shapes thinking. Most meals are just a version of pizza.
Pizza or stew.
I don’t feel like nobody can understand my POV. I grew up moving country to country and my classmates growing up led similar lives and probably had similar POVs. It was only in college that I realized most people lived their whole childhoods in one city, not counting vacations.
I think you’d be interested in looking into the concept of “Third Culture Kids”. I think the original book may be a bit outdated and lack some of the complexity of modern globalization, but it definitely made me realize a lot of things about myself when I read the book the first time way back.
I don’t know if no one can understand my POV, but I get myself into strange situations that are awesome. I speak English, Chinese and Spanish. Once I was in Brazil and while they speak Portuguese, everyone understands Spanish, but not necessarily English. Especially if it’s for a local tourist activity. I saw a pirate ship and thought my kids would love it. So I talked them into selling me tickets and boarded the ship. What I didn’t know was it had nothing to do with pirates, it was a boat to go to an island. And everyone was drunk on caiprinahas.
Anyway while on the boat, suddenly the boat guide person said it’s dancing time. I swear to God every one just started synchronized dancing. I thought it was a flash mob.
Then when we got to the island, on our local side, everyone was dancing and eating Brazilian food. I noticed a fence and looked over and realized half the island was for American tourists. And wow the difference was stark. The Brazilians were dancing and having fun. The Americans were overweight laying on beach towels and not moving. Really makes you think about culture differences.
Ultimately, I don’t know if people can understand my view points. But I am super grateful I know the languages I do because I get to have experiences others simply can’t. As well as I don’t worry about visiting random nations because I’ll almost certainly find someone who can speak a language I know. Like I had to speak Spanish once on top of the great wall.
I speak English, Chinese and Spanish.
我会普通话和粤语。我在广州出生，现在归化为美国公民。但，我汉语水平只是二年级。。。 Lol
I don’t understand how that works? I’m too lazy to write in Chinese at the moment since I’m drunk. But how can you be born in Guang Zhou and only have a second grade understanding of Chinese? That said, my Spanish is the worst of the three languages I speak. We are all going to have different levels of languages based on many factors. I’ll tell you what though, you’ll your best language when your smashed out of your mind…
Immigrated to the US after 2nd grade on an immigration visa with my family, which means the Chinese education ended, and so I started school in the US, and learning in English… 明白吗？😅
啊明白了。你那么年轻还能写中文那马好不错。我认识的大陆孩子搬去美国不知不会写中文，多不会说了。恭喜你。
写字啊。。。 👀
我靠拼音来打字。。。忘了怎么用笔来写了。。。
会看，会听，会说，会用电脑打字，不会写。
ah ha ha ha ha. 我也是。我太久没有用笔写字了。但是明显你好认识子已经比很多的人好。我觉得要手写太累了，还有很多人的字我看不懂
I studied abroad in Japan for a year back 10-15 years ago. I definitely experienced “reverse culture shock” when I came back, the feeling when you’ve had all kinds of new experiences and have seen the world from a completely different perspective, but then everything’s just… the same. The people you left behind are just a year older, the roads and the stores are all just like they were when you left, maybe a new fast food joint opened up and that’s the biggest thing that’s changed. It’s pretty maddening. Of course, you can talk and talk about all these stories and people and all that - and in fact it was pretty good for me in that I was able to overcome some shyness and social anxiety because I had something interesting to talk about - but there’s a lot of stuff that you’ll never really be able to explain, things that just can’t be put into words. Especially with language, I feel like we’re losing something as people rely more on AI translations (useful as they are) because my experience is that speaking a different language can really shift your whole perspective in subtle ways. Translation is metaphor, it is inherently an approximation of meaning. It is, however, a lot of work.
In time, my experience of living in Japan and the unique perspective it gave me has become one of many perspectives that I can draw on, and I have other shared or relatable experiences with the people around me. Granted, my experience abroad was a relatively short time, not like actually immigrating. But ultimately, everyone has different experiences that can seem very alien to others, even within the same country or culture. When we see these differences not as barriers but as providing valuable and distinctive insight, well, that’s the dream, isn’t it?
Considering more people in the world speak multiple languages than only one – multilingualism is the majority – no, we very much don’t experience existence from a point of view no one else can understand.
Definitely. I always speak Vietnamese with my parents at home, because that’s their mother tongue and it just feels much closer than speaking French.
Growing up as an immigrant is a unique experience, at one point one of my previous girlfriends said “you should stop with your immigrant things”. I knew it was over (for other reasons too, but that was one of them)
My current partner also grew up abroad, so she knows what that is like to be a foreigner in another country. We also live in a country where none of us are locals. But we’re both fine with that, because we know how it is.
Fluent in three languages. Mathematically speaking, there are enough people with my specific migration route (or even language combination) up until the point I left the US that there should be lots of ppl who think the same… But yes I do feel like my PoV can be a bit unique
The various forms of neurodivergence I have certainly don’t help… like for example I don’t have an internal monologue, which changes my PoV a lot. Actually the neurodivergence probably shaped my PoV even more than the languages; I never really fit in even at where I was born
Yes because I come from a rural region where most people can only speak French, and I’m the only one of my family that can speak multiple languages. Sometimes it feels like I know different worlds unbeknownst to them.
No because the languages that I know are not rare. There’s millions also speaking those languages so my perspective and experience is far from being unique.
Speaking from my own personal experience, recall and exposure as a whole give a definitive perspective on the human experience, as well as contributes to those you exonerated along the way.
As a whole I’ve found it isn’t a huge difference as a single event in the grand scheme but it can really add up over time.
No? The majority of my coworkers are also multilingual. They travel more often than I do.
