Re: Culture clash

Phil Yff <phil.yff@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

You have to take what they say with a grain of salt.

Indeed. I realise all the evidence that I have is both anecdotal and
subjective.

In my experience, Japanese tend to practice a certain amount of self
deprecation whereas North Americans tend to brag about their
accomplishments.

My anecdotes come from Australians, and they are also quite good at
self-deprecation. (Perhaps that's one reason Japanese people like it
here :-)

A Japanese might say she still has a lot to learn while an American
might brag about how well he speaks.

I've never heard any of these Australian people brag about how well
they speak. What I have heard, though, is that they praise the
*language* for being far easier than expected to learn to a simple
fluencyC.

(Side topic: Another untested hypothesis I have states that learning a
language is unlike most other things we learn, in that we aren't wired
to expect to still be learning it after childhood. So, when we *do*
learn a language as an adult, our brain tends to rebel when someone
tells us we're speaking incorrectly: even though consciously we know
that being corrected on mistakes is the only way to progress, we feel
every mistake viscerally in a way that isn't so for other fields of
learning, so it seems like all we ever do is make mistakes. This leads
people to be much less confident of their own second-language language
ability than they would be of equivalent learning in some other
field.)

--
\ "Even if the voices in my head are not real, they have pretty |
`\ good ideas." —anonymous |
_o__) |
Ben Finney
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