Random Culture Thread

This forum is to learn about foreign cultures and habits, because language skills are not everything you need as a world citizen...

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby Car » 2018-06-05, 20:11

Aurinĭa wrote:
Car wrote:Honestly, you can't go to the loo without having to listen to music?

Unless it's an attempt to mask other sounds.

Belgium seems to be more like Germany than the US. My dentist plays (Western classical) music, my GP doesn't. Supermarkets don't, clothing shops and the like often play pop music. Train stations don't, metro stations do. Interesting fact about that: they had a problem with youth loitering late at night in the metro stations in Brussels, making individual travellers uncomfortable. So in the evening they switched from playing (Western) pop music to playing (Western) classical music. And it worked, suddenly there were no more people loitering in the metro stations, only travellers passing through.

Thinking about it a bit more, some doctors do play music, usually radio stations, I think. Nice idea, glad to read it worked.
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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-06-06, 2:23

mōdgethanc wrote:Yeah, Vijay-bhai, it's not an exclusionary thing any more than any other facet of North American culture. You're in America, speak American, that kind of thing.

I get that by now. It's a lot more puzzling (and can seem exclusionary much more easily) when no one tells you what the motivation for it is.

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby Osias » 2018-06-07, 17:17

Brazil is like USA, as you are describing. :hmm:

The thing I don't understand is the restaurants playing music and having a TV on at the same time, you can't hear what the TV says, they are wasting electricity.
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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-06-12, 4:39

I've read before that in Cuba (or at least Havana), there's music playing everywhere except ice cream parlors. I wonder whether that's similar in some way to what you see in Brazil and maybe even to the fear of silence here in the US.

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby OldBoring » 2018-06-12, 22:09

In China they put loudspeakers outside the shops so you hear the very loud music or ads about the business on the street.

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-06-12, 23:35

In North Korea, people wake up in the morning to that kind of blaring music. (Of course, it is all propaganda songs).

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby Lur » 2018-06-15, 11:06

Question. I've been mostly been reading comics instead of prose lately, do we have a thread about that?

(I also want to come back to read prose and link to the stuff I find and so on, particularly the non-English stuff, "genre", stuff, female authors, LGBT content, which is what is getting me back to read basically!!)

Edit: dammit, I'm gonna be hooked to the forum again... which is not a bad thing because I talk to people and get motivated with stuff... :para: I'm just gonna try to not write in English all the time, or to bilingualize/trilingualize/whatever my posts if I'm not lazy...
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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby Prowler » 2018-06-26, 14:41

Dunno if it fits in this thread but here goes a Japanese map of Europe from 1924:

Image

It has interesting art and is a bit messy/confusing as well.

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2018-07-18, 17:18

When speaking on the phone, how do you signal to the other person that you wish to end the call? I'm not talking about situations where there's an immediate reason (e.g. "I have to go! The chickens are loose!"), but rather where you simply feel that the call has gone on long enough and you'd like to transition to something else.

Today on the street I overheard a woman say, "Let me leave you," which was new to me. She spoke with a Caribbean English accent. My father likes to say, "Well, I'll let you go," which seems to shift responsibility for wanting to end the call to the other person in the conversation. My inclination is to go meta, e.g. "Well, I'm really glad we had a chance to catch up", and hope they get the hint, since anything more abrupt than that could be interpreted as rude according to the etiquette I was raised with.

What do you say?
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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby Lur » 2018-07-18, 17:42

"I need to hang because [reason]" and, strangely to other people, "I'm sorry, but I don't like talking on the phone"
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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2018-07-18, 17:58

Lur wrote:"I need to hang because [reason]"

But what if the reason is simply that you're not interested in continuing to talk. Do you make up something plausible?
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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby Lur » 2018-07-18, 18:16

Then I'll panic and walk nervously in circles I guess.
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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-07-19, 2:45

I hang on long enough to wait for them to finally shut up long enough for me to make up an excuse. My grandmother used to literally just drop the receiver whenever she was done talking.

This reminds me that in Malayalam, the most common ways of saying goodbye literally translate to things like 'may it be', 'in that case, may it be', 'may I go', 'may I come', or 'may it stay/sit'. ('May I go and come', or literally 'may I come having gone', is probably the stereotypically Dravidian way of saying goodbye and apparently the most common one in Tamil, but it doesn't strike me as being quite as common in Malayalam, although it's certainly not unheard of in Malayalam, either). In my mind, this probably sounds more polite to me than English goodbye since it sounds like you're requesting permission to leave rather than unilaterally ending the conversation. However, that's not to say this is necessarily how native speakers of Malayalam would use any of these expressions.

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-08-13, 14:51

I found 3:59-4:46 of this Congolese festival intriguing.

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby Widukind » 2018-09-02, 21:31

In Canada... people put pineapple on their pizzas.

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-09-03, 8:32

Here, too.

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby Osias » 2018-09-03, 11:57

Here they put many other things too: http://g1.globo.com/sp/santos-regiao/no ... uropa.html
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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2018-09-03, 13:06

Widukind wrote:In Canada... people put pineapple on their pizzas.

Wait until you find out about donair pizza.
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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby Widukind » 2018-09-03, 23:12

Wow. Here I was thinking Canadians are the crazy pizza connoisseurs.

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Re: Random Culture Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-10-30, 5:08

From an Indian perspective, it's pretty weird how much Turks (maybe not just Turks) seem to love yogurt. I mean, we eat yogurt, too, but mostly as something to help cool us down while we're eating otherwise very hot, spicy food.


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