[Nevin1901]

As someone who recently moved from The Netherlands to USA, I found this article to be really great at explaining the reason why many Europeans find Americans to be fake. I myself had experienced all of the social experiences the author talked about, and found myself confused as to what a "friend" was in The USA. I also find it very interesting how the author described emotions as cultured - not just something which was the same to everyone.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts and experiences with different cultures.

[technothrasher]

Here's a cultural question I've been wondering since I visited Amsterdam as an American- I was walking along an up hill street in the evening, and I saw a young lady talking to her friends and smoking, with a baby in a stroller. The stroller started to roll down the hill slightly and she didn't seem to notice. It then picked up a little speed, so I moved to intercept it, and rolled it back up to her. When I delivered her child back to her she just looked at me with a slightly blank look, then gave a very quick barking laugh, and turned back to her friends. We didn't exchange any words. I moved on and went about my business, but to this day I have absolutely zero idea what her reaction meant <shrug>.

[dr_dshiv]

Hill? In Amsterdam? Suspicious detail!

[DonHopkins]

Amsterdam is a city of many mountains: the bridges over the canals.

[holoduke]

A bit ashamed probably, but definitely not the reaction you would expect from a Dutch person who almost lost her pram. A normal reaction would include a 'thank you' and maybe a joke to justify the act.

[mpol]

We live in a bizarro world.

Not sure if that was what she meant, I wasnt there. But if I responded that way, this would be the meaning.

[yread]

> Amsterdam

> up hill street

?

Do you mean a highway ramp or a bridge?

[alejo]

Maybe that’s a cultural difference as well (?)

I’m a non-american living in Austin, TX and what folks call hills here is different from what we call hills back home…

[technothrasher]

Lol, I know, I think I found the only hill in Amsterdam. Perhaps 'incline' would be a better description? Maximum elevation is Amsterdamn is 18m and minimum is -8m (according to the website I just looked at) so there has to be some inclines about and I clearly hit one.

[floxy]

Cultural differences aren't limited to international interactions either. Here's an interesting thing about exclamation points. Apparently there are (at least) two cultures of exclamation point usage in English. Apparently one culture uses them frequently as a marker of expressing general excitedness. The other culture sees them akin to yelling, which is appropriate only a small fraction of the time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38942179

[ks1723]

Interestingly I became aware of a similar cultural difference regarding punctuation: I frequently use three dots ‚…‘ in more informal emails at the end of a sentence to indicate that I am not sure about something yet or still wondering about it. Like „I guess we could discuss this tomorrow…“ or „Yeah, I might be able to do this…“

Some month ago an Italian PhD student of mine (I’m from Germany) asked me if I was upset or mad at him. I had no idea why he was asking and was completely taken aback by this suggestion. But turns out, in Italy (at least the northern part of it), the three dots typically indicate that you are upset or at least impatient with the receiver.

I still wonder how many of my Italian collaborators I have sent strange impatient emails in the past…

[9dev]

In the same vein, it makes a huge difference in a chat conversation if you finish your sentence with a dot or not. Writing something like:

I’ll see you there.

Has a very different vibe than:

I’ll see you there

Where the first one, with a dot, would signal the sender is mad or impatient while the latter is neutral.

I’ll see you there…

This one however… I’d also assume the sender is impatient because I just told them I’m gonna be late, or something bad happened („there“ being a funeral for example), or it’s unclear whether we will both arrive (a heavy storm might be coming, possibly blocking roads).

[dotnet00]

I think the ellipses have that connotation in a lot of places and kind of like with all-caps and exclamation marks, it doesn't seem as strongly connected to culture.

Some of my Indian friends use it the same way as you do, which often throws off some of my American friends, who interpret it as impatience, and vice versa.

[Lio]

A nice Indian lady I used to work with was horrified when I pointed out that her use of the "eye rolling" emoji is seen as rude and dismissive by lots of people.

It's always worth being aware of these differences if you can be and also giving people the benefit of the doubt too.

[Brian_K_White]

American, and I almost started a fight or maybe more like almost hurt my Filipina wife's feelings one time when I tried to complain about a certain, idk facial gesture? she does in certain cases, that just reads a certain way to me and is apparently not at all what she means.

I'll be saying something, and she'll raise her eyebrows up and down twice. To me it looks almost like Groucho Marx, and looks like someone thinks you are joking or saying something silly, and are responding with a non-verbal "oh really?" Or maybe like a suggestive flirting thing, except totally out of any flirting context, so wth does flirty suggestive eyes mean when you were talking about figuring out which outlets to plug the kitchen appliances into so that they don't trip the breakers? It just throws me right off the horse and all I can think is "WTF IS THAT?"

We're old enough and adult and frank enough that I can simply say everything I just said here and we tried to figure it out. It simply became the interesting thing we talked about for a while that day. But she could not explain it. So I never got an answer. It's just something she does unconsciously and apparently is not meant to deflate or derail or laugh at whatever I was talking about. It's apparently more like an actual "oh really?"

I never saw her even-more-filipina mom do it, nor her brother or sister or other family members, and she actually mostly grew up in the us and a few years in China but in a special place with all the other foreign people as her mom worked for the UN. So it may have nothing to do with the Philipines, or China.

So a little eye-waggle can be like that.

Update: I just told her I cited her in this conversation, and now she tells me her family and extended family does all do it, just I'm not around them enough to have seen it, and it is a phillipino thing, and it means I understand or agree like what I would do with a head nod.

[__jonas]

Hate to break it to you, but it has the same subtext here in Germany

[ks1723]

Hmm, interesting. I really wonder how I could miss this all my life. (Would have made them here as well, but not anymore)

Edit: spelling

[__jonas]

To be fair, maybe I was a bit quick with this claim, I think it works across languages and is more of a generational thing, strange Reddit link (sorry) but I feel like this explains it pretty well:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fs...

With the ellipsis I do feel like the tone is very context dependent.

[ks1723]

Ha, it’s just that I am old ;-) Thanks for the link!

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU COULD MEAN BY THAT.

[bombcar]

You forgot the exclamationistas, related to the commakazis, who just pour them!!! everywhere!!! whether!!! it makes sense!! or not!!!!

[rufus_foreman]

This exactly!

[christkv]

There is a huge different between a blue collar New Yorker and a Palo Alto techie in culture though. I’ll take the nyc rudeness over the fake politeness in California. As a European I fund New Yorkers much easier to connect and befriend people than people from both the pacific coast.

[red-iron-pine]

Same. NYC types will tell you to go fuck yourself on the street for walking on the wrong half of the sidewalk, and will give you the finger for basically any reason. But in private I found most of them to be warm, vibrant people. And, paradoxically, when I slipped on the street, random strangers were immediately jumping to my side to see if I'm okay and helping me up.

To paraphrase an old boss who was from NJ: we respect you enough to stab you in the front, and never in the back.

California, by comparison, was just as ruthless as Wall Street corpo raiders, but with a thick veneer of BS smattered all over it.

[xhevahir]

This article about Russian's habit of yelling is interesting: https://classical-russian-literature.blogspot.com/2020/07/th...

I haven't been to Russia but some of it reminds me of encounters I've had in Greece.

[negus]

As a Russian living among Greeks I can not say that I experienced any unusual rudeness. But yes, permanent smiling may be considered to be deceptive and insincere by some Russians.

But anyway: people tend to express themself in many different ways. It is great to be tolerant to others, while trying to be polite and culture-aware yourself.

[xhevahir]

The interactions I had--some of them, I should add--in Greece were combative from an American perspective and not a Russian one. If the scenes described in the link are typical of Russian life, then the Greeks I encountered indeed probably would not strike a Russian as rude.