ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
6d ago
Golden Gate Park is good for a walk (free) or to visit one of the museums (free if you're a Bay Area resident on certain days, but I've never been asked for proof), Land's End and the Presidio are good for ocean and bridge views, and for food besides the obvious Chinatown (bring cash) and the Mission (I'm not a big fan, but if you want to eat the best burrito on a street that smells like piss while strangers offer you magic mushrooms that's where to go) you could get a bento box from Nijiya Market (the Japantown Mall next door is pretty unique as well) or something on Irving St near UCSF. The Musee Mecanique has a a nice collection of antique coin operated arcade games and music boxes (it's free to go in and look around, if I recall). You could also take the ferry to Angel Island or Sausalito (among other places) if you want a change in scenery.
ResoluteRaven
10d ago
One Chinese deficit—which is arguably not even a deficit except from a Western, Christianity-inflected moral standpoint—is that they just don't seem to have an interest in much of the rest of the world. The downside of this (and to be honest, I'm a little disturbed by it) is how generally indifferent they seem to suffering that exists beyond their borders. I hope this might change as they become wealthier, but the social science research I've looked at does not show this happening, at least so far. Of course, this disinterest also has an upside: to me it seems obvious the Chinese don't want to conquer the world.
The Western mode of directly or indirectly conquering the world because you experience moral outrage at the suffering of the poor and oppressed masses is not the only way to relate to other nations, and taking a different approach isn't by itself evidence of disinterest in global affairs. At this very moment, Chinese laborers are building ports, railroads, and highways across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America; Chinese immigrants are cooking meals in restaurants in nearly every country on Earth, from the frozen sub-arctic to the humid tropics; and Chinese astronauts are orbiting the Earth in their own space station. These are not the behaviors of an isolationist state or people. That this network exists primarily to further international trade, rather than as a tool in some great moral crusade, seems to me eminently reasonable and not a weakness.
ResoluteRaven
12d ago
Don't even bother with trying to get the true ㄹ sound unless you learned Korean or Japanese from a young age. I'm convinced it's one of the most unintuitive sounds in the world for an English speaker. It's like halfway between an American "R" and "L" but leans more "R" at the beginning of a syllable and more "L" at the end of a syllable. Just using American "R" and "L" in that way is probably as close as most can get.
It seems unintuitive because it's two different sounds: at the start of a syllable it's a tapped r like in Spanish and at the end of a syllable it's more or less the same as the English l. Native speakers consider it one sound because there's only one letter for it, the same way English speakers think of the voiceless th at the start of "think" and the voiced th at the start of "then" as the same sound because they're written the same.
ResoluteRaven
12d ago
I've had some people tell me that 애 and 에 sound exactly the same, while others tell me that there's a subtle difference or that it's a regional dialect. I can't be sure.
Now this one I do know about. 애 and 에 merged in the speech of hip youngsters in Seoul in the 80s and it has spread to the rest of the country in proportion to how much one interacts with that crowd, similar to how the cot-caught merger is spreading among young Americans due to the cultural influence of California.
ResoluteRaven
12d ago
No, but I know in certain cuisines (e.g. Northeast Chinese) one might be offered a plate of raw garlic to take bites of as a palate cleanser between courses, similar to the pickled ginger served alongside sushi in Japan.
ResoluteRaven
13d ago
I've come across similar complaints from Korean learners on various language forums in the past, but I don't know it well enough to directly address your issue. What I would suggest generally is identifying a set of minimal pairs in Korean containing whichever consonants you find troublesome, pulling audio files of native speakers reading those words from Forvo, and then attaching those mp3 files to an Anki deck so you can do spaced repetition exercises and train your ear on those particular sounds.
ResoluteRaven
15d ago
I've spent most of my life surrounded by cosmopolitan liberals and I've literally never heard an IRL person say this. The only time I've heard it was 4chan shitposting on /pol/ as clear bait.
Europeans are more likely to say "America has no culture," while American liberals will specify "white people have no culture," but I've heard both IRL many times, though it was more common in the late 2010s.
ResoluteRaven
16d ago
In my experience second generation immigrants don't pick up certain regional accents because they have strong negative connotations among elite circles e.g. Southern or Boston, but they are more likely to when people don't feel as strongly about them e.g. Chicago. New York is also full of people with strange half-regional and half-foreign accents.
ResoluteRaven
19d ago
The normalization of "partner" also extends to heterosexual couples now, at least among my peers, which I find rather irritating.
ResoluteRaven
21d ago
Minneapolis really had no reputation in my mind, I wouldn’t have imagined it was any woker than any other semi-large American city, and probably comparable to Oklahoma City or St. Louis or something.
Minnesota was settled by Scandinavians who brought along their particular political tendencies, which included a strong labor movement and a certain brand of pathological altruism (cf. Swedish immigration policies). I'd say Minneapolis is about as distant culturally from Oklahoma City as any two cities in America could possibly be, nor is St. Louis much like either of them.
ResoluteRaven
21d ago
The Iranian population is much more secular and pro-western than their neighbors, even those that are American allies on paper, and has the human capital needed to support a first world economy, so the fact that they have been languishing under an Islamist theocracy for decades instead of achieving their full potential is a tragedy of similar proportions to Eastern Europe being stuck behind the iron curtain during the Cold War.
This latest round of protests was also sparked by economic problems such as rampant inflation and Tehran running out of water, and not the sorts of purely cultural issues that some here would pattern-match to foreign interference, such as the 2022 protests over the hijab law. Democracy is not what most are asking for; many of the protest chants I've heard are some variation of "Bring back the Shah."
This video gives a good overview of your options as far as Three Kingdoms adaptations go.
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