I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
Winter driving and shoulder season driving. Snow, ice, black ice, freezing rain, slush, hydroplaning, driveway clearing, walkway maintenance, windshield scraping, and keeping an emergency kit for breakdowns. Stuff like that.
Or driving in general. As an American who didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 21 (gasp! so old) due to some reasons, I can attest that many, many people here simply can’t comprehend the idea of someone over 17 or so not having one. I got turned away from a hotel once because they didn’t know how to use a passport as an ID.
The only other people I’ve met with this problem were immigrants. And we were always able to bond over lamentations of how difficult it is to solve this problem… the entire system to get a license here is built around the assumption that everyone does it in high school, so every step of the way is some roadblock like “simply drive to your driving test appointment”…
As an American who didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 21 (gasp! so old)
I’m now 41, never made a license - there wasn’t really much of a need until now. I can get anywhere I want with a combination of bicycle and public transport.
Guessing you live in or close-ish some kind of urban center? I got my license at 18 cause the closest bus stop from my parents’ place was a 30 minute walk from the closest bus stop, getting literally anywhere useful was at the very minimum another 30 minutes on top of this, and getting downtown was another 45-50 minutes of bus+metro over those last two stretches, assuming no traffic. I currently live 60km outside of town, it’s the exact same story. 20 minute walk to the bus, 30 minute bus ride to the train station, and 45 minutes of train to get downtown. North America was built for cars, for better or (especially) for worse, our public transit infrastructure is terrible, things are so far from each other, nothing was built for it…
When I moved out of my parents’ place and got an apartment in the city with my wife though, we managed without a car. Bus/metro/walking got us everywhere we needed for every day life, and we used car sharing services when we needed to go out of town. I wouldn’t mind going back to this, but living in town would be literally twice as expensive, and we’re deeply priced out of that area if we ever want to buy, despite me making a solid 6 figures lol
North America was built by the train, it was later destroyed for the car.
Yaaaaaayyyy
Currently in Finland - single family home in a town with 46k people. Originally from a 2k village in Germany.
We have two daycares, a school and a grocery store 1km from home - here that kind of stuff is integrated in the neighbourhoods where people live. Many elementary schools, some just grades 1 and 2 - by grade 3 they can already easily travel the longer distance to another school by themselves.
Sigh. My town is even larger and more populous than yours… Really discouraging. Jobs in my field (programming) are mostly around town, and it’s too expensive for me to buy there, so unless I manage to keep working remote indefinitely, I’ll never be able to buy lol
You’d be surprised how for you can stretch ANY transit infrastructure. I despise the resignation that North America was “built for cars” you’ll find people-centric places all over the country, both in cities and rural areas too. The biggest issue is that a lot of rural areas lack transit service, but fixing that would be relatively inexpensive. Unfortunate anywhere without transit is inaccessible to disabled people such as myself who are incapable of operating their own vehicle, so this is something we need to work on.
Most places were built for people, not cars. But many weee, and even more were demolished for them. But saying that North American cities were designed for cars ignores much of the history of North American urban development.
Either way, if a place isn’t transit accessible, it might as well not exist. Though I must stress that it is NOT difficult to make something transit accessible.
IMHO that’s kind of a simplistic view. Let’s take my town for example. Going down to Montreal on a bus takes 1h45 alone, so that’s not remotely an option. So next best option is bus + train, but closest train station is a 20-25min bus drive. So unless they manage to rezone and displace a bunch of people to lay another handful of kilometers of tracks through agricultural and residential land, new trains in my area won’t happen, therefore my best option will always remain bus+train. And it’s far anyway.
All decent transit around here covers areas I’ll never be able to afford to buy in. Or I could rent forever, I guess. Point is, everything is so freaking far apart around here that land based transit just doesn’t cut it. It takes way too long to get anywhere to get a viable option for anything but short distances. I used to live on one end of Montreal’s island… It took me 1h30 to get downtown by public transit. 3h+ a day sitting my ass on a bus/train/metro. That’s not acceptable. And I lived inside the city. Half the province lives in that Greater Montreal area, and transit doesn’t even cover it all properly. I had similar experiences in Quebec City, Gatineau/Ottawa and Toronto too.
It’s not resignation, it’s realism. By your own definition, 95% of North America basically doesn’t exist for you lol. If I wait for transit to become acceptable, I’ll be 50 by the time I do anything with my life. And I’ll be honest, I have a lot of trouble agreeing with the take that much of NA was built for people, when I see the amount of highway it takes to get from one city to another, or the amount of towns built around a large “stroad”. Intra-city transit might be fine in some areas, you seem to say it is, but it is not enough, with large North American cities getting way too expensive to live in for many.
Which is also better for the environment and a perfectly fine way to live. I think more people should be like that
I moved to the USA and then Canada as an adult. I had never needed to learn to drive in my home country because there were decent buses and trains. But you really can’t function easily in North America without driving a car, so I had to learn and start polluting like everyone else. It’s not a good setup.
This right here is a big one. I live in a college town in Minnesota and the students from out of state are absolute mennaces on the road in winter. My dad used to plow snow for one of the local universities. He had multiple students drive directly head on into his plow because they never cleared off any of their windshield before they started driving down the road. Luckily the snow plow tends to handily win in those situations and the plow trucks all had dash cams for exactly that reason.
You also get the people who think they’re invincible in the snow because they’re driving a 4 wheel drive truck. Newsflash, 4 wheel drive doesn’t mean you stop any better and it doesn’t do much when you’re on glare ice.
Similarly people who haven’t dealt with snow have no idea what to do when they do start sliding. So many people will just hit the brakes when they start to slide, which anyone who is familiar with winter driving should know that is the exact thing you never want to do.
Snow tires are another big one. I drive a tiny crappy rear wheel drive pickup but as long as I have a good set of snow tires on it and a few sand bags in the bed of the truck, then it still out performs any other vehicle with all weather tires in the snow.
I live in a ski town that caters to the Los Angeles crowd, and I feel you on all that. 4 wheel drive does not mean 4 wheel stop lol. We are lucky in that we don’t get that permafrost y’all get up north, usually the roads dry out a few days after a snow storm so snow tires aren’t mandatory up here. But the number of overconfident goofballs in the winter is way too high.
The big one I can think of are snow rated tires, most people have plain old radials that don’t do squat in snow. And then you have people that don’t know which axle is their drive axle and that’s always fun to watch. Thankfully I have a two door wrangler with all terrains that is a breeze to drive in snow, very rarely do I have to chain up.
What’s shoulder season driving?
So it will snow at night but warm up during the day so you’re dealing with icy conditions that have a layer of melt water on them. Or freezing rain that flash freezes at dusk to black ice. And so on.
And for people who don’t know, black ice isn’t actually black (unless is filthy with dirt). It’s ice clear enough that the black asphalt underneath shows through very clearly. This make it so you’re on ice and don’t know it because it just looks like regular road.
Fairly certain the shoulder here is referring to the season. The in-between fall and winter and winter to spring.
Was a bit of a learning curve for me, having moved from subtropical Florida to Colorado the land of eternal winter. I bought a Subaru.
I had an Uber driver in Florida last time I was there (business) and when he found out I was from Canada he told me he went to Boulder in the winter for a vacation and thought it would be cool to rent a car and drive up a mountain. Yeah, he was pretty freaked out by that driving experience. :)
Good call on the Subaru. My wife had a couple and they were great in the snow. First car we ever had with heated seats, too!
When I first moved here I thought to myself,”Damn there are a lot of Subarus here.”. The reason became abundantly clear during my first winter here lol.
I used to (sometimes skipping class) drive in the mountains almost every day when I was living in Boulder attending CU. I loved it and miss it dearly.
I’ve never been there but I lived in Banff, Alberta for a while when I was 19 (which was a while ago). I was cooking at a hotel there and living in residence. Sometimes I thought I’d stay there forever but I love the ocean, too. Jokes on me, I live in a city hours from the mountains and a day from the ocean now. :)
Something about a mountain town after a snow storm… Pretty cool.
Maybe I’m old but I love John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High. Takes me back.
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A few years ago I was stuck in a terrible traffic jam, five hours through ice and snow for a drive that should’ve been 50 minutes.
A woman froze in her car in that jam, and since then I’ve made sure to always have a warm sleeping bag in the car.
Also, heated side mirrors are so niceOne variant of this I encounter is driving in the rain. I moved to SoCal from NY, and everyone here freaks out when it so much as drizzles, and there is always insane traffic due to accidents upon any precipitation…
Something like two of the mates I grew up with can drive at all.
Speaking more than one language. Being from Switzerland, we’re required to study 2 languages (+ our native one) at school. So it’s not infrequent to encounter swiss people who speak 4+ languages
In Germany it’s also mandatory - but learning the language at school unfortunately doesn’t necessarily mean you can speak it. LucasArts adventures contributed more to my language skills than my first English teacher. I’m always shocked about the lack of English skills in a lot of Germans when I’m back visiting. Rather surprisingly one of my uncles born in the 30s spoke pretty good English, though.
We’re now living in Finland - me German, wife Russian, we each speak to the kids in our native language, between each other English. So they’re growing up with 4 languages.
It’s quite interesting to watch them grow up in that situation. When learning about a new historical figure my daughter always asks which languages they spoke - and few weeks ago she was surprised someone only spoke two languages. So I explained that some people only speak one language - she gave me a very weird look, and it took a while to convince her that I’m not just making a bad joke.
Also Germany.
I learned english in school but only enough to be able to read it.
Once I started reading user submitted short stories (lile fan fics but different) my grammar really improved.
Nowadays the content I consume is basically 90% english based.Just my capitalization and grammar structure sucks. Also my vocal skills as I have no one to talk to.
But: I really have to thank my last Grundschul and Realschul english teachers. Without those two I may have never got into english that well.
For me it was mainly watching films and tv shows in english. I’ve always preferred the original audio on anything, really. So it motivated me a good bit to become more fluent.
The only german dub I didn’t hate was Breaking Bads’, and even then I wasn’t overly fond of it.Can’t get over english cartoons dubs.
Ben10, Avatar ATLA and spongebob sound so much worse in english compared to german to my ears. Could not enjoy it.
Live action movies are usually equal or only slightly worse regarding original vs dubbed german.Now that I think about it, there is one that’s infinitely better in German, and that’s The Emperors’ new Groove
Legendary
So let me specify, I prefer the original if it’s live action
Oh yeah. Kuzcos Königsklasse is awesome.
Especially the villains.
Never watched the series, but it seems good
Without those two I may have never gotten into english that well.
FTFY. Not a dig, just correcting your already very good English.
It’s got in British English.
That’s a point current generation children are actively working on by following English-speaking streamers, communicating in predominantly English Discords, etc. The worst: my kid chose to prefer American English. Where did I go wrong?
I guess you didnt realize until it was too late.
Yeah, I think I’ve lost him (to the Colonies).
American english is the standard dialect for online content. And without exposure other dialects can be really hard to understand.
Not if you’re exclusively consuming Black Adder and old Top Gear videos online.^^
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Of course I know people that only speak one language.
It’s me.
In the UK I was given the option of German or French, but I wasn’t taught very well, and could barely speak a few basic sentences after 5 years of schooling. If this is a common experience, as I believe it is, it results in a populace who speaks english only. (Obviously an issue exacerbated by the commonality of English on the internet and popular media)
It blows my mind how inefficient my school must have been. Right now, I can’t imagine learning something for 5 years and retaining nothing.
I don’t know that it’s necessarily that it’s “inefficient”. Moreso that it’s difficult for a language to actually stick and be useful if you’re not immersing yourself in that language. You can go to class all you want, but if you’re not trying to actively immerse yourself in it beyond class, you’re not going to learn the language no matter how good the teacher is.
It’s relatively “easy” to immerse yourself in English language content because English has sort of become the “lingua Franca” of the modern world. Something like Polish, for example, isn’t.
I’m still not multilingual, but this concept made a lot more sense to me as to why I never retained my Spanish classes when I started learning programming. There’s a huge difference between say, reading a book / watching guides / reading tutorials on a programming language (which by itself generally won’t get you anywhere) vs actually following along, trying to make your own projects, etc.
How would a child do that, if no one in their community speaks the target language, outside of the ~90 minute class?
Well that’s exactly my point. It’s pretty “easy” to do it with English because there is so much English media to consume out there. A lot of shows and movies they want to watch are probably already in English. Their parents might speak English for work, etc. Less so with many other languages.
Same with French here in Canada. I took French for six years and I still don’t speak it at all, and I actually did really well in my French classes.
I spent more time conjugating verbs than actually speaking it.
Yep. French Immersion was the way to go if you started in elementary school or had above average academic skills for late immersion. I’m still disappointed I had to stop when I moved and getting to the school with the program just wasn’t feasible (had done two years of immersion prior). By the time I moved again it was Grade 10 and the presumed fluency was so high I would have struggled very badly.
Now the best option is dating a French girl, but my wife has reservations.
It doesn’t help that outside of school, you will never use that language. Even if you go abroad, everyone either wants to practice their English or thinks your French/German is so poor that they’d prefer to just speak English.
I took Spanish for three years here in the States. Most of the Spanish I know now I learned after high school. This seems to be a pretty common problem in nations with English as the official language…
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Common for everybody learning a language in an educational institution without RL practice. Immersion, of course, is the best way to learn a language, - gives good results even if you didn’t know it at all before being, eh, immersed.
and could barely speak a few basic sentences after 5 years of schooling
Thanks to events earlier last century pretty much everybody at least in Europe/Russia can speak a few basic sentences, and is often more than willing to demonstrate: “Haende hoch!” (hands up), “Nicht schiessen!” (don’t shoot) and a few others.
Oddly it’s actually very common (and required in some areas) in the US to study more than one language also. What is extremely uncommon are opportunities to use a second language, so very few people actually ever become fluent. It’s a shame really.
Exactly. Unless things have changed dramatically, one or two years of a foreign language is a requirement in high school, and there are more opportunities in lower K-12 these days from what I hear. However, you’re right that this is not especially helpful without some immersion, and the practice of trading your kids to a foreign family for a year is far less common. Then, after K-12, opportunities to practice greatly diminish.
The German mother of a good friend moved to the US West coast when she was a young adult, married, and had my friend. She never lost her German accent. When I was in my early 20s, I had the opportunity to live and work in Germany for a couple of years, and when I came back, I was fairly fluent - enough to pass as a native from a “different region.” I visited my friend when I returned, and tried to have a conversation with her mother in German; she sadly informed me that she had forgotten most of her German, and could no longer converse… there are few opportunities to speak in German on the West coast, and even native language skills attrophy if unused.
In a related annecdote, when I first returned to the states, I’d sometime fail to remember the English words for the odd thing, like “trash can.” All I could remember was the German word for it.
All thay has gone away. Years later, I can barely hold basic conversations in German. Maybe some people have an ability to retain language skills without practice, but I believe it’s far more common to lose fluency you once had.
That’s a good anecdote.
For my part I took Spanish from 2nd or 3rd grade all through college. I basically knew enough to be dangerous and it was occasionally useful in online chat where my broken Spanish was marginally better than some people’s non-existent English. But honestly the biggest strength was that I knew enough to be able to tell when Google translate did a bad job conveying my meaning.
Nowadays I’m several years removed from the last opportunity to use it at all and I hardly remember anything. It’s definitely a “use it or lose it” thing.
Reading always helped me to, at least keep the language alive in my head. So reading and understanding were never a problem.
But conversation? That degrades quickly to the point where people ask you from what country you are visiting…
Are you a transplant?
It also has to do with the wide diversity of languages spoken. The elementary school where my kids go put out a statement during the pandemic that there are 32 different languages spoken by kids at home. They had gotten many requests for school communications in more than just English and Spanish, and had to explain why that wasn’t feasible.
So there are a ton of bilingual kids in their school, but my kids could learn the 4 additional languages spoken by the kids in their classroom, and the following year they would need to learn 4 entirely new languages. They learned to count to ten in several languages, but like you said, they will never have the opportunity to become fluent if they don’t go somewhere less heterogenous.
Only speaking one language fluently makes me feel like garbage regularly, none of my schooling really stuck and I can never commit to language or feel enough confidence to use anything I do learn.
Found the Brit/American/Australian? (Delete as appropriate)
I believe firmly that anyone can do it. You just need to find community and a good reason to keep going.
I can speak a few languages, but only the one I speak right now is useful.
In Sweden kids learn English from second grade and a third language from fifth grade.
What really annoys me is how many programmers seem to expect us to only be able to understand one language. I much rather have the program made in English than to read a bad Swedish translation.
As in non swedish programmers try to translate into Sweedish for you?
Yes exactly. Google is a big culprit of this, for instance translating descriptions of apps in Google play or giving me results on Google search in Swedish when I specifically wrote it in English. If I had wanted results in Swedish I would have written it in Swedish. Adding quotation marks doesn’t even help. I miss the time when you actually got what you searched for and not what Google believes that you search for… YouTube has an issue in the app when looking at playlist. Since the word “visningar” is so much longer than “views” the rest of the line is cut off. So you for instance can’t see if the video was posted 1 month ago or 1 year. This is more a failure of gui due to translation than the translation it self though.
On the subject of shitty translations: a budget webpage translated “disabled”, as in “this option is turned off”, as “funktionshindrad” which means a person with a disability. I bug reported it and the initial response was:
We do not currently support this functionality, but will pass your feedback on to our product team, who will make a note of it and try to incorporate it into our product as soon as possible.
Two months later they wrote that it would be forwarded to their product team for “whenever there’s an update in our system”. That was 10 months ago and it still isn’t fixed.
Presumably what they meant, yes. Sometimes YouTube translates video titles for example. Of course, the video is still in the original language, so it’s completely useless, except for videos without speech.
Every program should have a setting to define in which language you want to interact with it.
YouTube supports multiple audio tracks these days and sometimes it decides that I should listen to a dubbed version of a video. Somehow all media players are very limited when it comes to settings for language preferences.
Which is ridiculous and funny, because our (at least 15 year old) DVD system can swap between audio tracks flawlessly!
Growing up in Australia I was required to learn a second language in years 7 and 8. All I can remember is how to say “and now cumshot” thanks to my friend and I finding his dad’s porn collection.
we’re required to study 2 languages (+ our native one) at school
This is crazy to me. I studied French at school for years and got to a decent enough level, but then when I tried to take Spanish later on I couldn’t deal with it. Maybe if they’d been concurrent it would’ve been a different story but I just couldn’t keep the languages separate in my brain. Then years later when I moved to a different country the French pretty much left my head as a new language replaced it.
I guess I’ve only got one “foreign language center” in my head and only one language can occupy it at any time.
you need to keep using it. Watch a show or read a book in that language every once in a while. It’ll do wonders to keep the brain on it.
Keeping them separate is a struggle! Especially if they come from the same ancient language. I have troubles separating like German and English, and also Italian and French. Especially when I try to speak German, I end up throwing in lots of English words and structures
Knowing how to swim. Basic life skill in a water-rich country, but many expats can’t.
Surprisingly, many Irish don’t know how to swim, even though it’s an island.
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It’s fecking cold!
Can confirm. Went swimming in Ireland in the summer once, my friend who lived there gave me a wetsuit to wear. Some other locals wore them, others didnt.
I stayed dry and fully clothed while building a sandcastle and watched the locals go swimming in wetsuits. Can’t remember where, somewhere on the coast of Claire or Galway.
I was staying in Doolan, so it must have been Bishops quater beach. It was in 2004, so I could be wrong.
So are Irish conditions different from conditions over the sea in Wales, or…?
It’s not that cold. It’s the Gulf Stream, which flows south-north from a tropical origin so it’s warmer than the water on the US west coast, for example, which flows north-south from the Bering Sea on the Alaska Current.
The Gulf Stream is also why northwestern Europe is as temperate as it is while being at the same latitudes as southeastern Alaska and northern British Columbia which have heavily glaciated coastlines.
If the Norwegian fjotds were in Alaska, for example, they would be the mouths of giant glaciers, but they aren’t, again because of the warming influence of the Gulf Stream.
Not sure if that makes sense, but anyway.
There are plenty of beaches and people often travel to thembfor the sake of enjoying the beach. The main issue is that for 11-12 months of the year, the water is fucking freezing. If people learn to swim, it’s often in heated swimming pools as kids.
I can relate to this.
We learned swimming in primary school in Germany, no opting out.
But having lived in several African countries and now in China, it’s surprising how many people not only can’t swim, but are deathly afraid of water.
In Australia it’s not just knowing how to swim but where to swim and when. A lot of tourists drown in the ocean here because they don’t know how to read the waves / don’t have an understanding of the local area.
In Ontario, it’s often swimming.
Lots of lakes here, children need to be taught to swim
Dutchy here.
Most, if not all, children learn to swim when they reach age five. Lots of water here, it’s pretty much a basic life/survival skill.
That leads to a follow up question to people from different areas: Is swimming a regular part of school sports?
I grew up in Germany with pretty much no lakes, and we had blocks of sports classes in the swimming pool from first grade - didn’t make me a great swimmer, but I can go swim a bit in a lake without having to worry.
Now we’re in Finland (lots of lakes here), and also swimming classes take place from first grade.
It’s generally not taught by default in US schools, but some schools offer it as an elective and/or as a competitive sport. Maintaining a swimming pool is an expense that many schools, especially in poorer districts, cannot afford. Outside of schools, there are sometimes community swim classes at places like the YMCA, but those require the parents to be actively involved (like with many extracurricular activities) and usually are an additional expense.
Physical education is usually a mandatory part of US schools through high school (where students graduate at around age 18), and schools often offer students a selection of sports for PE - I did fencing one year and wrestling, gymnastics, and archery other years - but swimming requires more infrastructure than a basketball court and some padded mats.
Maintaining a swimming pool is an expense that many schools, especially in poorer districts can’t afford.
German here: the solution for most of the schools I went to and heard of (elementary) was to get a bus to drive to the next public swimming pool and they’d let us use it for a few hours. The government is funding that. And that solution worked for most of them, although I only managed to get do my swim test after swimming classes in school because I was anxious about it.
NL here. It’s similar here. I remember the bus, our school would hire a coach to take group 3 (think six-year-olds) to swimming at the pool on the other side of town. And until you had at least one diploma, you were required to come along. By group five, everyone had at least a basic swimming diploma.
When I was a kid in Florida in elementary school, that’s what most elementary schools did, mine was next door to a swimming pool so we just walked. At the time I think it actually was mandated by the state - swimming pools in backyards are extremely common there and it was an upsettingly common occurrence for kids to drown in them, so they took a week to make sure we all knew how to tread water. I don’t know if Florida kids still learn how to tread water or if swimming lessons are now woke somehow.
Physical education is usually a mandatory part of US schools through high school
In Germany the same - but swimming classes are mandated by law from grade 3 onwards, though we started going from grade 1 back then.
American here. The nearest swimming pool to my hometown was in Canada. So no.
Edit: I don’t think this is normal
Also american here and I learned to swim before I started preschool. But I also live in the land of 10,000 lakes so it’s basically a requirement here. So this is another one of those things that is going to depend on which state you’re in.
Oh yeah, I make no claim that any of my experiences are anywhere near universal. Basically no part of the American experience is.
How big distances / population are we talking here?
I was growing up in a small village, so in elementary school we went by bus to a nearby village with 7000 inhabitants and a swimming pool.
Now we’re living in a town with a population of 46000 with its own swimming pool.
Yeah, a small village. It would have been a half-hour bus ride to the town of ~5000, but they couldn’t compel all students to get a passport, and the nearest pool in the US would have been about an hour and a half away, so it was never part of the curriculum. Some kids had their parents drive them to Canada after school for private (expensive?) swimming lessons, but it wasn’t standard.
Not where I am. It never came up, despite water technically being everywhere. People just assume I guess. Still not something I can do.
I had swimming as a subject from 7 years old in school here in NL.
It used to be part of the school curriculum but it was often after most children had at least learned the basics in swimming classes.
There’s dedicated swimming schools, run by swimming pools and overseen by the government.
Same for Swiss. It’s not normal that you can’t swim here.
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Italy.
Cooking, every foreign person I know eats 20x more takeout and fast food than I do.
In the dry SW US the answer is drink water when it’s 100F or worse 115F+. Having a half liter of water from the hotel for the half day mountain hike, or pounding a half gallon of ice water and throwing up five minutes later. Your body doesn’t tell you when you should drink, it tells you when you are already behind on drinking.
Dealing with winter. I live in the rural upper Midwest, where winter can hit -20 with whiteout blizzards, week-long power outages, and car-burying snowdrifts. I’ve seen too many people move here from warmer places and think “I guess I’ll buy a warmer coat and a snow shovel”, rather than “I should have a backup generator, a backup heat source, a few barrels of spare fuel, a month’s worth of stockpiled food, and at least two different pieces of heavy snow-moving machinery tested to be in good working order”.
Here in Switzerland the question you ask is usually, “do you ski or do you snowboard”? It’s just assumed that you can do at least one.
I guess here in Korea it’s eating with chopsticks. In Sweden it was Swimming (especially for my Indian work mates). In Germany it was opening a beer bottle with anything you just happened to have in your hand at that time. In Poland I’m not sure, but probably making those elaborate sandwiches for parties.
Is the chopstick thing a dexterity issue? I’m so more inclined for chopsticks that, if eating alone, I’ll use the other ends of my silverware like chopsticks (and I’m not a part of any chopstick culture).
I dont think it’s so much an overall dexterity issue just a practice issue. Someone who doesn’t regularly use chopsticks might have really high hand dexterity but they just haven’t practiced that finger coordination. I.e. its easier to teach an athlete a new sport but a football players gonna have to practice to play hockey well.
The most common mistake I see with infrequent chopstick users is overgripping and a low grip. If you squeeze too hard it not only fatigues your hand but it actually makes them harder to control, same for choking up on them. If feels more secure but it actually gives you worse control. For any one wondering a high grip and only as tight as you’d hold a pen should make it easier to use chopsticks.
Yeah, opening a beer (or other bottpe with a capped lid) is a very cool skill to have (one which I haven’t really mastered since I drink beer very, very infrequently).
I feel that. Always makes me feel like a failed German lol
In Germany it was opening a beer bottle with anything you just happened to have in your hand at that time.
This goes for Denmark too.
Used to be the case in Switzerland, now most beer bottles have a twist-to-open cap that still looks like a normal beer bottle cap.
How to walk on ice is a big one. How to cross a street is another one here in Chicago (hint: look at the cars, not the lights).
For the ice one you mean taking a running start, sliding on it, and yelling weeeeeeeee… Right?
Just like crossing a street.
In Chicago it’s the same thing.
I didn’t, but that’s another learned skill in this category, yes.
If the country is big enough (aka Canada) these differences can be between provinces. People from Ontario can’t ride bulls, but every kid in Alberta can. Newfoundlanders can fish but Manitobans are afraid of water. In British Columbia you are taught how to roll marijuana cigarette in high school but in Nova Scotia scotch is the bag lunch drink of choice.
Southern Georgia, USA.
This is more of a regional rationalization about occasional weather hazards. Here in coastal Georgia, we get snow from time to time, about a half an inch to two inches once every three to five years. There’s a lot of people from colder climates that move here for work or retirement; they hear “a possible light dusting of snow” on the news or from a weather app and think that means nothing. Where they’re from it’s just normal, happens every year and there’s often more. They’ll even laugh at us for shutting down the schools and staying home from work for freezing rain. Here’s the thing: no one here knows how to drive in snow and will likely only see black ice a dozen times in their lifetime. Further, we have no salt/sand trucks, we have no plows, we have zero civic infrastructure to meant to deal with our very occasional ice storm or light snow. It happens so infrequently that there’s no way to justify spending taxpayers’ money to prepare in that way for those kinds of situations. So we shut down the schools and most businesses for a day or so and everyone mostly stays home. We’re not necessarily unprepared for winter weather, we just prepare in a different way that makes sense for the situation.
Just misunderstanding social cues. Where I live (Spain), there’s a script you’re supposed to follow for certain things and newcomers, understandably, don’t understand the script. One famous example is buying new clothes. They all look great on. The idea here is that the poor person spent their hard-earned money on the new clothes. Damned right they look great on! Another would be birthdays celebrated in public venues. Perhaps someone you know is celebrating their birthday in a public venue and you had no idea they were celebrating their birthday on that day. You walk up to them and wish them a happy birthday, BUT you were not invited to this celebration. Since you weren’t invited you did not come prepared with a present for the birthday person. The safe thing to do is to ignore, socialize with the people you came with, and make like that person isn’t even there until they approach YOU. When and if they approach you, you make pretend you’re all distracted and you have to be like, “Ahhh! I didn’t see you! What’s up?” The reason: that person is buying all the invitees the drinks and food. In exchange, the invitees have brought presents. It’s a very nuanced and weird situation all of us have encountered. We err on the fear of not having brought a present because we had no idea because we were not invited.
The birthday thing fascinates me because it’s the exact opposite of how you would handle it in the US. Here you would wish them a happy birthday and then move on since you weren’t invited.
In the USA, the birthday thing is the best thing about the USA. It’s all about being selfless (I’m American btw, been living in Spain for so long I’m a citizen) and it’s actually something that creates conflict in interpersonal relationships between natives of Spain and the friends they make that are not from here. It is a huge drama that somebody needs to make a documentary film about now. This birthday thing has no age. It could be a 20th birthday or a 100th birthday. You ain’t invited, you didn’t know, you didn’t bring the presents, you just keep to yourself in the public venue. It’s harsh. It’s harsh because you were excluded and you don’t care, because you’re American, you just want to be nice and wish them a happy birthday. Spanish people are all nope on that shit. It’s all about the presents and who bought you the drinks and food.
are you saying its transactional then? like a social contract of “it’s my birthday, so I’m paying for my guests food and drink.” You, my guest, have accepted that contract by bringing a gift?
This flies in the face of birthdays I’m used to. There’s no expectation that If I invite someone to my birthday that a) they need to give me a gift (I would never expect that) or b) I’m paying for their food and drink. I guess because that social contract isn’t in place, the idea that someone can come over and say happy birthday isn’t a big deal. It’s just a gathering that happens to be on my birthday.
It’s not really transactional. It’s just a situation where you got left out of the birthday and happened to go out to the same place where the birthday is being celebrated. However, it’s interesting to note that there is no such thing as a surprise birthday party. The birthday boy or girl is the one that throws the party because of the reciprocity aspect. You wouldn’t be caught dead attending a birthday without a present for the person whose birthday it is. You also wouldn’t be caught dead letting people bring you birthday presents AND buying you dinner. It’s more like “tit for tat” than “transactional.”
That’s interesting. Would you please further explain the clothes shopping thing? Is it that it is rude for a shopkeeper or, say, the people you may be shopping with to say anything except “That looks great on you”?
It’s more like after they bought the new clothes. Like, your friend bought new clothes and wants to show you what they bought. It could be a friend, a brother, a sister, a cousin, an aunt, anybody. While shopping for clothes, before they buy the clothes, is the right time to criticize. It’s perfectly acceptable, and desired, to be out shopping and trying on clothes before buying them, to say whatever you like. “That makes your ass look huge, don’t buy that!” is desired, not discouraged. Never trust the salesperson. The employee of the store is going to tell you it all looks good so you buy it, even if it looks bad. They even try to sell you more crap, saying things go together when they don’t. I’m talking about after they bought the clothes and they’re showing you what they bought because you’re their friend or relative or whatever.
Is it not true in the US too? I wouldn’t tell someone who wasn’t a very close friend that their new outfit looked bad after they’d already bought it. That just sounds like a jerk move even here.
Yeah, it’s very similar, but at home in the US I can think of a few situations where it might be ok to say it looks bad from my personal life.
Got it. That makes way more sense. Thanks for taking the time to explain it.
huh, so the implication is that saying it looks good means that you’re passing judgment on the outfit when it would be incorporate? to my American sensibilities when i pay a compliment it’s just to be encouraging. there’s no thought in my head that i might say something negative about it. sometimes it’s like seeing a kitten and going “aww” I just try to let the kind impulse thoughts out intentionally. especially when complimenting my fellow men’s appearance. we don’t get that enough otherwise.
Lmao wtf is going on with the birthday party one.
I really think it would be a great movie plot. Could even be a slasher film.
