3 ms·

> Europeans sometimes imply Americans are dumb or hopelessly provincial Indeed, and not only because of monolingualism. During my time abroad, one thing frequ

by myth2018 4y ago

> Europeans sometimes imply Americans are dumb or hopelessly provincial Indeed, and not only because of monolingualism. During my time abroad, one thing frequently caught my attention: when I first met someone, they'd always said "I'm from country A"... except people from US. They introduced by mentioning their cities instead. I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school? And on monolingualism: granted, English is currently the de facto international language, so the economic incentive for them to learn a second language might be lower. But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas?

yamtaddle 4y ago
I think when we travel abroad, we're aware everyone can tell we're Americans without our having to say so :-) > I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school? It's habit. It's how we talk to one another about where we're from—major city, or nearest major city. Aside from a few states where people like to lead with that (mostly Texas and California—meanwhile, if someone says "New York", they probably mean the city; there's a little easy-to-miss comic jab about this in the show Archer, where Archer a couple times corrects someone who says "New York City" with "you can just say New York", as the latter usage reads "higher" in a social-class sense). It's a consequence of our largely-homogenous culture being spread over such a huge land area, I think. Recall, again, that we generally have way less experience talking to people who live in other countries, on account of how very far we have to travel to encounter many such people—and even then it's mainly Canadians, who can and do sometimes pass for American pretty well (we're much worse at passing as Canadian) and Mexicans, those being the only two countries that share a land border with us. 99.9% of the time when we're telling someone where we're from, it's someone who is familiar with US geography. Besides, "American" doesn't narrow things down very much. It'd be like someone from Germany leading with "Europe" when describing where they're from. Right, I guessed that already—but where? Germany? Austria? Switzerland? Belgium? Our nationality is far less specific, geographically, than those in Europe. > But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas? Sure, but it's a big commitment to both learn a language and keep up that skill, and it mostly has to be maintained kind-of "artificially", for Americans. Conversational skills and accent in particular can be very difficult to maintain. Americans remain strong aspirational speakers of second languages, it should be noted—Spanish and sometimes a few other languages (French is common, Chinese increasingly so, others like German or Italian sometimes) are taught, to some degree, to nearly all our kids, but it's hard to even find good teachers because there's just no culture in which to keep up those skills, so a lot of the time those classes are taught by people who aren't good speakers (let alone native) themselves. The kids, for their part, promptly forget everything except a phrase or two, since they never use the language outside class, and even the ones who try to go farther find it both practically difficult and, lacking much extrinsic motivation or a kind of natural need, discouraging. > reading foreign original works I mean... very little reading happens these days, period, aside from trash-tier online reading, romance novels, and self-help books. At least in America. We're far removed from a time when "author" could practically be counted a blue-collar profession, there was so much demand for fiction. Among the same groups of people in which reading remains semi-common, you're likely to find folks trying desperately to hold onto their grasp of one or more major literary foreign languages (and mostly failing at it). [EDIT] Actually, now that I think about it, you may also be seeing some class bias—Americans who can travel abroad are more likely to have at least some of their culture and norms influenced by the set of people who think in cities (if not more specific!) everywhere—they don't visit France, they visit Nice, they don't visit Italy, they visit Milan, they don't have a modest apartment in America or even New York (City) but Manhattan, and so on.
- myth2018 4y ago
  > I think when we travel abroad, we're aware everyone can tell we're Americans without our having to say so :-) Why? And how you do that? I believe it's not from the looks, right? I met a guy in Berlin who was from New York. When I first saw him I even thought he was Brazilian, because his hair and skin color were exactly like mine. > It's habit. It's how we talk to one another about where we're from—major city, or nearest major city I believe this is everybody's habit, as long as they are in their own country. I live in a large country too, and we don't have a lot of contact with people from neighboring countries (so the fact we share borders with many countries is irrelevant), but I don't know, when I go abroad something just switches in my mind, it feel just too obvious that I'm talking to people with perspectives other than what I find in my own country. And I notice the same behavior in people from other nations too. That's why this habit from US nationals calls my attention. > Besides, "American" doesn't narrow things down very much. It'd be like someone from Germany leading with "Europe" when describing where they're from. Right, I guessed that already—but where? Germany? Austria? Switzerland? Belgium? Our nationality is far less specific, geographically, than those in Europe. "American" really don't narrow things down to the city level. Not even to the country level. But this is what I find strange: why would you narrow things down to people who are not aware of your geography? When you visit another state and introduce yourself, would it make sense to tell them your street name, number and apartment instead of your state or city, to narrow things down?
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > Why? Mostly because of Europeans constantly telling us that we stick out like a sore thumb, when traveling—it seems to feature in most every discussion of Americans and international travel. It makes some of us really self-conscious about not "seeming American" abroad, which I guess maybe we do semi-successfully if you're in-fact having trouble picking us out, more often than not. Hell, what is leading with a city when asked "where are you from" if not exactly one of those boorish (they always are boorish, aren't they—that's why some of us are self-conscious about it) tells? This current exchange is about, exactly, one of these things! > "American" really don't narrow things down to the city level. Not even to the country level. But this is what I find strange: why would you narrow things down to people who are not aware of your geography? When you visit another state and introduce yourself, would it make sense to tell them your street name, number and apartment instead of your state or city, to narrow things down? This is not a great application of reductio. > I live in a large country too, and we don't have a lot of contact with people from neighboring countries (so the fact we share borders with many countries is irrelevant), but I don't know, when I go abroad something just switches in my mind, it feel just too obvious that I'm talking to people with perspectives other than what I find in my own country. And I notice the same behavior in people from other nations too. That's why this habit from US nationals calls my attention. The US is really isolated. An American who travels outside the US, Canada (where the people largely are semi-familiar with our geography, on account of most of them living very close to the US and the strong media ties between the two countries) and (maybe) Mexico more than a countable-on-one-hand number of times in their whole lives is a major outlier. A very high proportion of our population never, ever does. Mexico might manage to counter our cultural isolation a bit, but it's regarded as unsafe, so travel there outside of well-tended resorts isn't common (see e.g. Wikipedia's list of global military conflicts for why we might have that perception—yes, yes, I know, our own drug war policies probably contribute, et c., but the why hardly matters for someone who's just trying to plan a family vacation) Reasons Americans rarely travel abroad include: 1) Long flights are necessary to reach almost anywhere else. 6+ hours (best likely case) on a plane is really unpleasant, bordering on impossible for people with health issues (this will matter in another point). 2) Most Americans don't get much time off in a year, and often struggle to take even what they have as a large block of time. Short trips overseas suck (see: point 1 about how long the flights are) 3) We do have time off in retirement, for those of us who manage to retire—but by then, the difficulty of long flights is much-amplified (see point #1 re: health) for many. 4) The cost of flights makes such travel way more expensive than a road trip—and we're not short of interesting places to drive (especially natural attractions). It becomes hard to justify several hundred dollars per person for a flight when you still have a list of dozens of great places in the US you've yet to visit... so, travel abroad competes with some very-good, cheaper alternatives. The result is you see basically two types of American abroad: seasoned, usually pretty-rich travelers (if not committed ex-pats), and people for whom this is one of maybe two or three trips beyond North America they'll ever take. Those latter aren't likely to develop much in the way of overseas-travel habits. And, see my edit on the prior comment for why some of those richer travelers might tend to lead with a city—it's a class-cultural thing, they also tend to name cities when talking about other countries (they don't even go to "the Alps", or Switzerland, it's always somewhere more specific like "St. Moritz"; the same set don't go to Colorado, like the rest of us would tend to say in the US when visiting Colorado, they go to Vale or whatever)

yamtaddle 4y ago

I think when we travel abroad, we're aware everyone can tell we're Americans without our having to say so :-) > I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school? It's habit. It's how we talk to one another about where we're from—major city, or nearest major city. Aside from a few states where people like to lead with that (mostly Texas and California—meanwhile, if someone says "New York", they probably mean the city; there's a little easy-to-miss comic jab about this in the show Archer, where Archer a couple times corrects someone who says "New York City" with "you can just say New York", as the latter usage reads "higher" in a social-class sense). It's a consequence of our largely-homogenous culture being spread over such a huge land area, I think. Recall, again, that we generally have way less experience talking to people who live in other countries, on account of how very far we have to travel to encounter many such people—and even then it's mainly Canadians, who can and do sometimes pass for American pretty well (we're much worse at passing as Canadian) and Mexicans, those being the only two countries that share a land border with us. 99.9% of the time when we're telling someone where we're from, it's someone who is familiar with US geography. Besides, "American" doesn't narrow things down very much. It'd be like someone from Germany leading with "Europe" when describing where they're from. Right, I guessed that already—but where? Germany? Austria? Switzerland? Belgium? Our nationality is far less specific, geographically, than those in Europe. > But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas? Sure, but it's a big commitment to both learn a language and keep up that skill, and it mostly has to be maintained kind-of "artificially", for Americans. Conversational skills and accent in particular can be very difficult to maintain. Americans remain strong aspirational speakers of second languages, it should be noted—Spanish and sometimes a few other languages (French is common, Chinese increasingly so, others like German or Italian sometimes) are taught, to some degree, to nearly all our kids, but it's hard to even find good teachers because there's just no culture in which to keep up those skills, so a lot of the time those classes are taught by people who aren't good speakers (let alone native) themselves. The kids, for their part, promptly forget everything except a phrase or two, since they never use the language outside class, and even the ones who try to go farther find it both practically difficult and, lacking much extrinsic motivation or a kind of natural need, discouraging. > reading foreign original works I mean... very little reading happens these days, period, aside from trash-tier online reading, romance novels, and self-help books. At least in America. We're far removed from a time when "author" could practically be counted a blue-collar profession, there was so much demand for fiction. Among the same groups of people in which reading remains semi-common, you're likely to find folks trying desperately to hold onto their grasp of one or more major literary foreign languages (and mostly failing at it). [EDIT] Actually, now that I think about it, you may also be seeing some class bias—Americans who can travel abroad are more likely to have at least some of their culture and norms influenced by the set of people who think in cities (if not more specific!) everywhere—they don't visit France, they visit Nice, they don't visit Italy, they visit Milan, they don't have a modest apartment in America or even New York (City) but Manhattan, and so on.

myth2018 4y ago
> I think when we travel abroad, we're aware everyone can tell we're Americans without our having to say so :-) Why? And how you do that? I believe it's not from the looks, right? I met a guy in Berlin who was from New York. When I first saw him I even thought he was Brazilian, because his hair and skin color were exactly like mine. > It's habit. It's how we talk to one another about where we're from—major city, or nearest major city I believe this is everybody's habit, as long as they are in their own country. I live in a large country too, and we don't have a lot of contact with people from neighboring countries (so the fact we share borders with many countries is irrelevant), but I don't know, when I go abroad something just switches in my mind, it feel just too obvious that I'm talking to people with perspectives other than what I find in my own country. And I notice the same behavior in people from other nations too. That's why this habit from US nationals calls my attention. > Besides, "American" doesn't narrow things down very much. It'd be like someone from Germany leading with "Europe" when describing where they're from. Right, I guessed that already—but where? Germany? Austria? Switzerland? Belgium? Our nationality is far less specific, geographically, than those in Europe. "American" really don't narrow things down to the city level. Not even to the country level. But this is what I find strange: why would you narrow things down to people who are not aware of your geography? When you visit another state and introduce yourself, would it make sense to tell them your street name, number and apartment instead of your state or city, to narrow things down?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Why? Mostly because of Europeans constantly telling us that we stick out like a sore thumb, when traveling—it seems to feature in most every discussion of Americans and international travel. It makes some of us really self-conscious about not "seeming American" abroad, which I guess maybe we do semi-successfully if you're in-fact having trouble picking us out, more often than not. Hell, what is leading with a city when asked "where are you from" if not exactly one of those boorish (they always are boorish, aren't they—that's why some of us are self-conscious about it) tells? This current exchange is about, exactly, one of these things! > "American" really don't narrow things down to the city level. Not even to the country level. But this is what I find strange: why would you narrow things down to people who are not aware of your geography? When you visit another state and introduce yourself, would it make sense to tell them your street name, number and apartment instead of your state or city, to narrow things down? This is not a great application of reductio. > I live in a large country too, and we don't have a lot of contact with people from neighboring countries (so the fact we share borders with many countries is irrelevant), but I don't know, when I go abroad something just switches in my mind, it feel just too obvious that I'm talking to people with perspectives other than what I find in my own country. And I notice the same behavior in people from other nations too. That's why this habit from US nationals calls my attention. The US is really isolated. An American who travels outside the US, Canada (where the people largely are semi-familiar with our geography, on account of most of them living very close to the US and the strong media ties between the two countries) and (maybe) Mexico more than a countable-on-one-hand number of times in their whole lives is a major outlier. A very high proportion of our population never, ever does. Mexico might manage to counter our cultural isolation a bit, but it's regarded as unsafe, so travel there outside of well-tended resorts isn't common (see e.g. Wikipedia's list of global military conflicts for why we might have that perception—yes, yes, I know, our own drug war policies probably contribute, et c., but the why hardly matters for someone who's just trying to plan a family vacation) Reasons Americans rarely travel abroad include: 1) Long flights are necessary to reach almost anywhere else. 6+ hours (best likely case) on a plane is really unpleasant, bordering on impossible for people with health issues (this will matter in another point). 2) Most Americans don't get much time off in a year, and often struggle to take even what they have as a large block of time. Short trips overseas suck (see: point 1 about how long the flights are) 3) We do have time off in retirement, for those of us who manage to retire—but by then, the difficulty of long flights is much-amplified (see point #1 re: health) for many. 4) The cost of flights makes such travel way more expensive than a road trip—and we're not short of interesting places to drive (especially natural attractions). It becomes hard to justify several hundred dollars per person for a flight when you still have a list of dozens of great places in the US you've yet to visit... so, travel abroad competes with some very-good, cheaper alternatives. The result is you see basically two types of American abroad: seasoned, usually pretty-rich travelers (if not committed ex-pats), and people for whom this is one of maybe two or three trips beyond North America they'll ever take. Those latter aren't likely to develop much in the way of overseas-travel habits. And, see my edit on the prior comment for why some of those richer travelers might tend to lead with a city—it's a class-cultural thing, they also tend to name cities when talking about other countries (they don't even go to "the Alps", or Switzerland, it's always somewhere more specific like "St. Moritz"; the same set don't go to Colorado, like the rest of us would tend to say in the US when visiting Colorado, they go to Vale or whatever)