ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
15hr 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
15hr 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
1d 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
3d 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
4d 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
7d ago
The normalization of "partner" also extends to heterosexual couples now, at least among my peers, which I find rather irritating.
ResoluteRaven
9d 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
9d 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."
ResoluteRaven
22d ago
That would require a level of industrialization in Latin America that seems unlikely, barring direct American conquest and economic administration (and good luck with that).
ResoluteRaven
22d ago
And I think with a truly "worthy foe", most Americans would set aside political tribalism pretty quickly, and band together against that foe. The problem is, we haven't had anything close to a worthy foe since the Cold War.
Economically, the Chinese are far ahead of where the Soviets were relative to the US during the Cold War, and the last time there was a hot war they chased the Eighth Army halfway down the Korean peninsula while at a severe technological disadvantage, so they seem plenty worthy to me.
ResoluteRaven
22d ago
My impression is that in recent years the relative status of top American and Chinese universities has flipped in elite Chinese circles, such that someone who went to Harvard is seen as a slacker who ran away because they didn't do well enough on the Gaokao to make it to Tsinghua.
ResoluteRaven
24d ago
I was given three choices: novocaine, laughing gas, and general anesthesia. When I tell foreigners this they usually make some remark about Americans being a bunch of wimps who need to be knocked out to have their teeth pulled. I assume this is downstream of the more widespread overuse of painkillers by doctors at that time.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
This is for the most part true, however there's a small but growing cohort of younger supporters of unification, in part because they're envious of all the shiny new infrastructure on the mainland, but also because the main pro-independence, DPP-voting cohort has aged out of being the cool young rebels and become everyone's cringe parents or teachers who can be triggered by loudly claiming that you identify as Chinese. This group more or less occupies the same ideological niche that the dissident/extremely online right does in American political discourse these days.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I mean, there's still a significant fraction of Americans (maybe a third of the population and disproportionally older/rural) who always keep their shoes on indoors, and to people from certain other cultures this behavior really does feel like the equivalent of shaking someone's hand after sneezing in it or dipping it in mud, so it's not that surprising.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
As far as I can tell, the rise in anti-Indian sentiment is a Canadian phenomenon (due to their own particular failures in immigration and housing policy) that has metastasized within the online right but not within the wider American public, which still has about the same opinion of Indians (tech nerds who smell funny) as it has for the past several decades. I've spent plenty of time around 1st and 2nd generation Indian immigrants and had very few bad experiences, at least of the sort worth generalizing. There are perhaps some ways in which they are less assimilated to American culture than other immigrant groups e.g. wedding traditions, but that's about it.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I prefer my kids will have good childhood at cost of some boredom as teenagers (boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway). Hopefully they are ready equipped to handle some adult excitement when they are adults.
In college I noticed that my classmates who had grown up in New York were generally more responsible and less likely to get into the sorts of trouble that a naive suburbanite would. Now, it certainly had more to do with parenting style than the nature of the built environment, but the latter sort of kid was notable for their paucity of life experience and inability to deal with interpersonal conflict. Personally, I went from living in a third world country to an American exurb at age 8 and the latter was so mind-numbingly boring that I have no memory of anything that happened in my life, good or bad, between then and high school.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
The New Urbanists are having about as much success restricting single family development as Hamas is at destroying Israel.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I have the Orion Scenix 7x50 and they work pretty well for most uses I can think of. Nikon and Celestron are good brands as well. I also bought a pair of solar filters to look at the eclipse last year and they were a big hit at my watch party.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I found that a good pair of binoculars was a better entry point to amateur astronomy than a cheap telescope. They are more portable, you can still get nice views of things like Jupiter's moons or the Andromeda galaxy, and they are handy for other hobbies like birdwatching if you get bored and want a change.
ResoluteRaven
1mo ago
I have relatives who speak three kinds of Chinese. Growing up, they spoke one only with family, another was the local vernacular, and they learned Mandarin at school. In all likelihood I will be the last person in the family to (barely) speak our ancestral tongue, but if I'm lucky one day I will have children who can deploy a few choice insults, like Sopranos characters spouting broken Sicilian phrases. Otherwise I appreciate the benefits of linguistic standardization, up to a point i.e. everyone being monolingual anglophones would be boring as hell to me.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Multiple countries have changed which side of the road they drive on, adopted the metric system, or switched the alphabet used to write their official language, so clearly such reforms are possible, even if they cause a great deal of temporary confusion. The question is simply whether the inconvenience is worth it and if the political will exists.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
I would eliminate pennies, nickels, and dimes as you suggest, but bring back a redesigned half dollar coin as well. I also prefer dollar coins to bills, and think having both in circulation is silly. The price reform is sensible, but as others have pointed out the $200 bill would mostly just help the money laundering industry.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
China graduates several times as many scientists and engineers as the US every year. Even if each of them is of lesser quality and their future demographic collapse is certain, that doesn't mean they aren't a rival in the short-term.
ResoluteRaven
3mo ago
Countries with mass immigration like the UK, Canada, and Australia (most of Europe is not far behind) have had negative real GDP per capita growth in recent years (despite massive and increasing government spending as a major contributor to GDP I might add).
Apples and oranges. H1-B's are a tiny fraction of the total immigrant population and are selected for education and skills. The process could certainly be made more selective, but in no way does it compare to the kind of mass influx seen in Canada, Europe, or across the southern border.
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.
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