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Book Translates American Minutiae for Russians
Coming from a Latino culture it is funny to see that Russians look a lot like Latinos.
- vlokshin 14y agoAs a russian-american on HN, I'd be curious to know how this made the front page. Untested assumption: High concentration of russians/easter-euros.
- bcbrown 14y agoAlternate hypothesis: a high concentration of Americans, who are fascinated with anything to do with themselves. That's what I found interesting about it.
- RobotCaleb 14y agoIndeed. I found myself eager to get a copy and see how I really behaved. I suspect I'd learn rather a lot about Russian culture by seeing how we stand out via the descriptions in the book.
- fusiongyro 14y agoI would love to read the inverse of this book: explaining Russian minutia to Americans like myself. But I agree, if this exists in English translation it might be worth reading for this purpose just by contrast.
- chrisduesing 14y agoI started looking for the same thing myself, so far I have only found an unavailable Russian language version on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Amerika-Zhivut-zhe-liudi/dp/5699558330/ http://www.amazon.com/Amerika-Zhivut-zhe-liudi/dp/5699558330... Would absolutely love an English translation if anyone finds one.
- eclipticplane 14y agoOr educated, curious Americans that are merely curious how others portray us. Even with the short article, I'd never even second guessed interviewing a babysitter would be even remotely strange to other cultures. To be fair, I no longer do so -- my friends' kids are finally old enough to watch mine. Hey, I pay decently -- and it gives my friends a night kids-free, too. Win-win-win!
- fooooobar 14y agoIn soviet Russia, the front page makes you.
- ChrisNorstrom 14y agoHN has a lot of international members from all over the world. I can confirm this using Google Analytics from the few times my articles made it to the front page and I got hit with thousands and thousands of visitors. They're from all over the place, Africa, Asia, Europe, South America. The USA is still the biggest chunk of my traffic. When my last article got on HN's front page, I got hit with 29,000 unique visitors in 24 hours. 14,000 of them where from the USA, the rest are from all over the world. So who knew? HN is a very global community.
- digitalWestie 14y agoAs a Brit, I found this a fascinating read as I got to learn more about two cultures. Also interesting as I'm travelling around the US at the moment.
- drrotmos 14y agoAs a Swede, I concur.
- ddon 14y agoAnother Russian on HN here :)
- apaprocki 14y agoThere are many who were either born in or immigrated to a large US city who might have never experienced suburban life. One doesn't have to be Russian to be shocked by differences in US suburban/city life. (американец -- женат на украинке, учится говорить по-русский)
- vlokshin 14y agolots of those :)
- toyg 14y agoTimezone. European mornings tend to see more Eurocentric posts making HN homepage; as the day progresses, you can really see a shift, ending with more "valleyism" overnight. I don't really see many "australasian" posts though.
- phpnode 14y agoI think that just comes down to numbers. There are only about 40 million people in Australasia compared to 740 million people in Europe and 312 million in USA.
- toyg 14y agoBy saying "australasia" I'd also include Japan (130mn), South Korea (50mn) and India (1.3bn) -- not China, which is notoriously insular on most levels. They sum up to a sizeable contingent that doesn't seem to be represented in HN posts (note: i'm not saying they should, this is not about political correctness). I noticed the occasional post about Indian matters, but it looks like the other Asian communities are just not interested in HN at the moment.
- 6ren 14y agoNot because it's about russians, but because it's interesting: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
- ptolts 14y agoI'd like to know more about Americans not drinking hard alcohol. Doesn't seem to be the case here in Canada.
- gruseom 14y agoI suspect he means that Americans don't drink hard alcohol by Russian standards.
- duaneb 14y agoIt seems to be a practice mostly abandoned here after college as a sign of immaturity. Or at least, that's what my New England sensibility says.
- untog 14y agoDrinking hard alcohol? Really? I'd say drinking beer drops off more after college than hard liquor. I am anecdotal evidence of course, but these days I drink more scotch and less beer.
- shardling 14y agoWhile I know several people whose drinking habits have followed that trajectory, that's more because they can now afford it than anything else.
- AnthonyMouse 14y agoI don't think there is any absence of it so much as a difference in degree when compared with certain other cultures. That's the thing with the melting pot: You can find a little of everything, including people who don't drink. I think the prevalence of workaholics may have something to do with it too. Drinking on the job is very seriously looked down upon here, but if you can't drink while you're working and you're always working then you're never drinking.
- mistermumble 14y ago
- JeremyMorgan 14y agoAfter living with a Native Russian for the last 2 years I'm sure much of this book wouldn't surprise me. From what I've seen there are some really good things in Russian culture, and some not so good. Just like America. We can learn from them, and they can learn from us. Maybe this book will help that.
- snogglethorpe 14y agoRussian culture: good points: no excuse too small for a vodka party bad points: no excuse too small for a vodka party
- demetrius 14y agoDon't forget about the dangers of being eaten by bears who walk on the streets...
- anonymous 14y agoThat is actually a law mandated by the state. Street-bears population must be kept at a sufficient level to allow for the traditional morning bear-breakfast: In order for a Russian wife to prove to her husband that she's ready to have children, she has to wake up before sunrise, kill a bear with her bare hands and bring it home for breakfast.
- cafard 14y agoThey walk in the streets now and then within 30 miles of Washington, DC. But garbage cans are easier to chase down than even fairly sedentary & nutritious pedestrians, so there's not much danger.
- huhtenberg 14y agoThe expression is "And here we are again with no reason to not have a drink".
- alexkus 14y ago
- patrickgzill 14y agoI am trying to learn Russian, and in communicating with people in the USA who are from Ukraine or Russia, they often ask me "why is X done this way"? So that is why this book is interesting to me.
- snitko 14y agoI've been on a visit to the US recently and while I do know quite a lot about it, some things I didn't know and it was an interesting puzzle to try to come up with reasons why certain things are done this way and not the other. So, a couple of points to keep this post interesting: * You're mostly out of luck if you don't have the exact amount of money to ride a bus. Machines don't give change. Probably because everybody has a pre-paid ticket and tourists are expected to take a cab or rent a car. * Showers are all built into the wall. Impossible to find a shower that you can hold in your hand. Seriously inconvenient if I want to shower my feet, for example. * In Russia, it's the police who ask you for an id all the time. In US, it's bartenders. * Lots of homeless people everywhere. They look much healthier than russian homeless and most seem perfectly capable of making money on some job, that requires minimum skills. But they don't work. Also, they're very entrepreneurial: unlike russian homeless, they approach you very actively and ask for a change or something else. * Probably that's why people look at you very suspiciously when you approach them on the street to ask for a direction. * Flight attendants and airline pilots still speak English I can hardly understand, although it's their native language. * No kettles (been discussed here and on reddit before) * Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism. Because if you think about it, it's just business owners redistributing responsibility of paying their employees to me, the customer. Might be a good idea, or might piss me off: I hate calculating how much I should tip after having three beers. It does make the system less centralized, but it also reduces customer convenience. And I was also not sure where should I tip and where it's not very common. For example, no one in Europe tips a person at a bar serving you one beer. It's just beer, for god's sake. Not so in US. Now the problem for me is that when I go to another country where they don't tip, I feel very guilty for not tipping. It's a very hazardous practice for some reason.
- 14y ago
- EugeneOZ 14y ago"Why Americans do not lie, for the most part. " LOL
- cema 14y agoLol indeed, however the way of lying here is different from that in Russia: the scale is different. Small scale lies are not useful and therefore are much less used (perhaps because the pay off is small and the price is larger).
- sologoub 14y agoFunny that they note about the tendency to interrogate strangers about personal details. My wife still gets offended by that. I guess after 15 years, I've learned to just play along and ignore unwanted questions. Though the article says there is no word for privacy, in Russian private and personal are the same word. Any info that is truly personal is off limits to strangers.
- huhtenberg 14y ago> It seems strange, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, that ordinary Russians would still be hungry for details about how ordinary Americans eat and pay mortgages. What a lovely innuendo. They might be "hungry" for these details, but not because they envy the lifestyle or are looking up to it. A lot of Russians still view Americans as self-indulgent, somewhat retarded know-it-alls, bathing in life's luxuries that make no sense. There are stand-up comedy acts that center on how you can't get a whole pickled cucumber in McDonalds (even though there's a sliced version in every hamburger), how there exist separate trimmers for a nose and for an ear hair, how Americans drink vodka "on the rocks", etc. Ordinary Russians are no more hungry for the lifestyle details than for UFO encounter stories and Thai transvestite pictures, with "hungry" being way too strong of the word in either case.
- startupstella 14y agoAs a Russian American, Ive noticed a definite curiosity remnant from the cold war regarding how the two countries live. The difference is that Western culture is all over russia (from copying tv shows like American Idol to Fabrika Zvezd), movies in theatres, etc whereas in the US, it's the older generation that harbors a curiosity about Russian people. My father, a doctor who emigrated at 35, started practicing in a small town in the midwest about 20 years ago. He had patients who wouldnt see him as soon as they learned he was Russian...and he had patients that displayed a real curiosity over our food, language etc. I'd say that Russians possess a certain disdain for Americans...they would love to enjoy a similar quality of life, but they find the culture too simple/vapid/devoid of meaning. Russians will say they would NEVER move to america, but many of them would in a heartbeat
- sethg 14y agoA lot of Russians still view Americans as self-indulgent, somewhat retarded know-it-alls, bathing in life's luxuries that make no sense. And they’re right! We are!
- detst 14y agoYou are reading way too much into a single word and it's a shame that another nit-picking contrarian viewpoint like this gets voted to the top on HN. I've heard Brits claim that they keep the royal family around for the amusement of Americans. No one attacks that claim because it's obviously just a joke. In this case, it's just a word that you've certainly read way too much in to (why you've done that I won't speculate).
- gadders 14y agoWhen I was working for a large global bank, we came across an intranet site created by our new Russian offshore partners about how to work/deal with Brits and Americans. One gem that stood out was that "It is customary in the UK/USA to shower at least once per day."
- StavrosK 14y agoEh, that sounds like good advice to me. I shower whenever I get smelly, which sometimes can be every two days if I haven't been very physically active. In the US/UK, people usually take a morning shower, while I prefer mine in the evening. Just because a culture is different doesn't mean it makes no sense.
- theorique 14y agoOne gem that stood out was that "It is customary in the UK/USA to shower at least once per day." Isn't this more or less the standard world wide?
- gadders 14y agoThe implication was not. I can really only speak for the UK/US, barring anecdotes I hear about the Paris Metro.
- rmah 14y agoNo, it's not the standard world wide. For the simple reason that consuming that much water and energy (to heat the water) costs a lot of money. And most people in the world don't have that much money.
- stuaxo 14y agoThis sounds great, I hope they bring it out in English for the UK market.