311–320 of 398 posts
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I feel the same way about China tbh Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?
The west deliberately blocks Chinese media. In asia, China's culture is far more prevalent and gaining quickly.
Being a large city should no longer be seen as a positive attribute. It just looks like a bigger wound in the middle of a forest and natural terrain. Packing millions of people into a vast paved area does no good. It socks all life from country due to concentration of work and services. Early human settlements had an objective of collective strength against the predators, invaders and shared help for all problem. Cit…
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I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears... I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when nati…
For example, examine your own words when you say that where you come from its a subtle form of discrimination. Well, you are saying it yourself that an action is deemed discriminatory according to the standards of your own culture, not to the standards of the other culture. You realize that could be cultural misunderstanding? There is a word for evaluating another culture by the standards of one's own culture: ethnocentrism.
If you are actually living in Japan, you should self-reflect a bit about what problems you face that you attribute subconsciously in your head to malicious intent, rather than cultural misunderstanding.
Anyways, I'm often disappointed by the comment section on this website when its anything about Japanese people. This is just another reminder for me to avoid the comments.
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Nice theory, but my experience is exactly the other way around. Even after several years of learning Chinese I still had trouble communicating with Chinese people, especially those who had no experience talking to foreigners. When I arrived in China and asked the way to the university I was going to (which was close by and very famous) they just didn't get what I was saying. In the end I had to show them the written…
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How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages , with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.
Being a large city should no longer be seen as a positive attribute. It just looks like a bigger wound in the middle of a forest and natural terrain. Packing millions of people into a vast paved area does no good. It socks all life from country due to concentration of work and services. Early human settlements had an objective of collective strength against the predators, invaders and shared help for all problem. Cit…
Dense cities use up a lot less resources and land than the same number of people spread out in smaller cities or suburbs.
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What is the air quality like to actually breathe in your experience? I have noticed Jakarta on lists of poor AQI and it doesn't look great [1] but I think the AQI number is kind of an abstraction. [1] https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta/hi...
Air quality is terrible. AQI does not lie. It's even worse when you're sitting on the back of a motorbike 6ft away from 10 other gas powered bikes. There is slow adoption of electric vehicles, but still very low adoption rate (like less than 10% of motorbikes).
The best breathing I've done was in Mumbai. Felt like a silk blanket both in the lungs and on the skin. I'm sure it would be bad for me if I stayed there a few decades, but it didnt feel bad at all when visiting.
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I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time. The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a…
How did the language end up with a Latin alphabet?
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Clean safe water from the sink is not something you'll find in most of the world, in fact. It's not just SEA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Safe_drink_tap_water_map.... So basically it's only safe to drink tap water in western countries + Japan, Singapore, Chile, South Korea, and a few of the rich Arab countries. I would argue that even the blue areas here would be speckled with lots of non-drinkable areas if yo…
Any idea why that is? Why is safety of tap water high(I hope) priority in some parts of the world and not the others? Is it simply the economics of water purification and delivery or something else?
You will notice that many of the countries with unsafe tap water also have electricity reliability problems. If the economics of electricity don't work, then the economics of safe water don't work at all.