Japan/The World and Stereotypes

Wow, when did you go to Japan? The last time I was there (summer 2011) i didn't see anything like that. There's always a policeman with a big, long cane standing guard at the entrance from the train station though.

I don't think you have to feel like an 'outsider' here, we're all part of the same community and your thoughts and posts are very appreciated. I get that there's a difference between posting-styles in the two subgroups that have arisen, but your question articulated my same thoughts about that post which I couldn't seem to put into words. All thought out contributions in this discussion are welcome, even if you are a sangry grognard.

I've lurked here a substantial amount of time to make sure this wasn't the sort of place where this happens. I've come to the conclusion that if you don't post in Santorum, and you're not an obvious troll, you're going to be fine.

And now I'm afraid to post things.

Um.
I find it interesting that people say I have a Californian accent, even thought you can find people talking like me all over the world?
I want to say it's because lots of movies that make it around the world use this accent? I don't...I don't know?
I'm trying to make a conversation that won't end up exploding evolving in a certain way and having people feel uncomfortable.

That sounds pretty feasible. I always find it amusing how many 'English' speakers around the world actually talk American because they've learnt it from TV and films.

Unless, of course, their mother tongue does not accommodate some English words (which is entirely plausible, since English is a HORRIFIC MUTT LANGUAGE THAT MAKES LITTLE TO NO SENSE AT TIMES), in which case, you'll get Engrish.
which is adorable in its own right.

Pretty much this, except that for some bizarre reason, people randomly think my accent sounds British, especially with certain words like 'water' and 'eventually'. But yeah, most of my idioms and phrases come from standard American TV, which is probably nothing to be proud of. But hey, we can't all be Terry Pratchett.

It's off-topic time! I watched this horror show about how the US government is in cahoots with McDonalds to make America fat by subsidizing cheap junk food (lucky bastard, junk food is so pricey here, it's like a special treat. Apparently veggies are expensive at the states?). However, I could not take them seriously because they kept showing pictures and videos of yummy junk food, and the whole thing was like an hour long commercial with inputs from experts (because obviously, if broccoli was cheaper, everyone would have preferred it to chips!). I had to turn off the TV and go listen to music, to drown the siren call of chocolate (we only had cheap dark choco, anyway, and these always have horrible after taste). The US of A, where even anti-fat documentaries contain commercials.

Actually, I do wonder. If yucky health food (tomatoes soup and fresh veggies and, I dunno, tofu?) was cheaper then yummy fattening food (I mean normal processed stuff, frozen pizzas, not McDonalds and such), would you switch to healthier diet and stop buying yummy treats because it's pricey? (snacks are hella expensive here and it never stopped anyone, so I'm doubtful, but in the name of the scientific method, I'll ask.)

Um. Well I mean, I don't really buy the bad stuff too often anyway, because I mean that's just unhealthy and then I'll gain weight and then i'll get fat and then-
So I don't think it'd affect me too much. :D
But I'm sure it would really, really affect some other people, especially those that are less fortunate. I know that people say it's cheaper to make a meal from *fresh produce* and all of that good stuff, but some people genuinely do not have the time to do that. That sounds like a cop out, but it's true. There are people out there that make very little money and have to work multiple jobs to support themselves and the rest of their household, so fast food is kind of their only option. If you make that more expensive...eugh...

If only they had a healthy version of fast food, haha~
"HI, CAN I HAVE TWO FRESHLY CHOPPED SALADS AND A PLATE OF JUST GRILLED WHITE MEAT CHICKEN BREAST AW YEAH THIS IS PERFECT THANKS"

Quite often the salads at fast food places contain more fat/calories than some of the burger entries. However that doesn't necessarily make them more unhealthy, since they may have more vitamins and so on, depending on content.

That's a huge problem the western world faces right now... this complex tangled web of health, morality, and food that we've tangled together into a giant knot... you'll see people loudly proclaiming something to be "healthier" simply because it has fewer calories. Eating nothing has the fewest calories of all, and that's CERTAINLY not healthy! ... but terrifyingly IS the extreme that some people start going to.

Choosing the item with the lowest number of calories is not "being healthy". Eating chocolate is not "being unhealthy". These are just pieces of a far more complex system.

Switching over to eating home-cooked vegetarian food will not necessarily make you thin. Will it make you healthier? Maybe! It depends on you, and what you're currently eating, and what exactly you put into that home-cooked food! But what definitely doesn't help anybody is to assume that certain foods are evil and anyone eating them is sinful or stupid... or worse, to look at someone, assume without any information that they MUST eat junk food because of what they look like, and then start berating them for eating sinful food when not only is food not a sin but they haven't even done it!

That is magnificent. That's Japan for, fully committing to the spirit art, while respecting the traditions of the origin! (Or maybe not. But it sounds like something that might possibly be right. Sort of.)

Considering British singers sing in American as well, I just assumed it's something that happens. obviously, music has been invented IN AMERICA. Everything has been invented IN AMERICA. Or inspired by it. IN AMERICA.

Except it's not really used as a fetish in the usual manner and my God, the series is heartbreaking. Everything is deconstructed. EVERYTHING! It hurts.

This is a rather old and awful article that addresses, as part of its story, why English and other foreign musicians rap in a fashion that owes more to the American vernacular, its idiosyncracies, and, in particular, to the strong Brooklyn accent that spawned much of the influential early hip-hop and rap. Now, I'm not about to defend famous pop stars who flatten their rather sharp accents in order to appeal to the global market, but there exists a rather long and proud history of musicians paying homage to the style they are playing in by attempting to mimic, in every way, down to every last detail, the original progenitors. The Rolling Stones did it and I am not surprised to find that Japanese rappers do it.

With a genre that is so distinctly American, breaking free from the genre norms is probably tough enough if you want broad spectrum appeal; it is probably even more tough if you are trying to adhere to what you view as the "rules of the game" while pushing the boundaries of the artform while doing so bound by an accent or a language or a vernacular that not only doesn't favor the conventions of the artform itself ("flow") but is at odds with the underlying rules of rhyme and meter (and so on) that it is based on (see: why French rappers are "better" at "normal" rapping than the English).

Australian hip hip has a fairly large following here. They mostly rap in broad Aussie accents, but there's definitely US influence in the music.

Well if we're going to post non-American hip hop (midly NSFW, I've never seen so much sex in a video, without actually having any people in it).

They definitely have weird pronounciation that emulates an American accent.

On the accent bit, this is slightly unrelated, but I went on a(n optional) 10 day trip to Japan with my high school Japanese class and during two of the days we stayed with host families (separate ones, since there were a ton of us.) While we did try and use our Japanese as much as possible, you can get along in Japan pretty well just speaking English since Japanese students are required to take six years of English during middle and high school. Of course, like the language requirements anywhere, there are people who just do what they need to pass and then promptly forget all the English that they were taught during school, but there are also people who try to remember what they've learned and continue to improve beyond school, so that there are a lot of people who will try to practice their English when they see a white person (if they aren't too shy and self-conscious about making themselves sound like an idiot around a native speaker.) So I know I wasn't the only one guilty of speaking English a little more than I probably should have around my host family.

However, I talked to several of my friends and found that I was pretty much the only one who didn't try to "Japanese-ize" my English by making it sound like I was saying everything in katakana. The reason I didn't do so was because I thought it would allow for more learning. After all, how are they going to know how native speakers speak English if they never hear native English speakers speaking naturally? I explained this to my friends, but they said that Japanese people would know the way they were speaking wasn't how English speakers normally spoke. I wasn't sure how they thought Japanese people would know this, as I've watched enough Japanese shows and played enough games to know that characters who are supposedly native speakers of English, even on educational shows, often don't sound like it. I know the reason they were doing this was because it felt more Japanese to do so and so that they could be understood better and not because they were racist or anything, but I still think it would have been better if they'd just spoken normally unless they were experiencing a lack of communication which pronouncing words with a "Japanese accent" could fix.

I guess my point is that it's good to just try and talk normally to people, no matter who they are or where they are from. Generally, if they can't understand you, they'll let you know (though there are of course exceptions to this, as some people can see admitting they don't understand as very embarrassing.) On the other hand, I don't think it's good to assume that someone is purposefully speaking in an unnatural way just because the way they are speaking doesn't match up with their appearance. That's stereotyping too. Maybe they're just speaking normally. "Ebonics" (which is kind of a racist term, but I don't know a better one for it) isn't just spoken by black people, even in America. There are rural areas where it is used by white people as well. And who knows, maybe English isn't actually their first language and they learned it from people who used Ebonics, either directly or by listening. This could even be true of people speaking dialects that aren't actually spoken by real people. Maybe they learned the language by watching a TV show where people spoke like that and didn't know that it was racist and/or stereotyped.

I'd also like to add a comment to people who are frustrated when people ask them to teach their language. I just wanted to say that I've probably been guilty of this in the past (though I believe that I've only done it to people I actually knew, rather than strangers) and as annoying as it probably is, I hope you'll realize that it typically comes from a genuine desire to learn on the part of the person asking and they probably don't realize how annoying they are being. It's not really my business, but I think a good compromise might be to tell them that you don't know how to go about teaching the language to them, but if they start to learn it, you'd be happy to converse with them sometimes so that they can practice. Just a thought.

This has been another wall of text, brought to you by Nekochi. <3

What is a 'Californian' accent besides valley girl (do other states use 'like' less than us?)? My class had a substitute teacher from Texas a few weeks back, who had a prominent southern accent, and I asked her if it sounded like our class sounded like we had accents. Nope. Californian intonation sounds like the English spoken on television which is broadcast across the nation.

...I honestly can't think of a different way to pronounce besides changing the 'a' to the ''classic British'' style.

I think my accent is generically American except when I pronounce "aunt" "AUnt" instead of "ANT". Where I live there are people who pronounce water "worter", which is interesting.

Wow, who said that? : ( I think the stereotype that all Americans are egocentric, insensitive ass-horns is as much a stereotype as any other race's. We're not all going out of our way to be as jerky as possible and stealing credit. Geez, everyone hates us and if we try to defend ourselves, people say we're continuing to be douchebags. That's tough.

In regards to healthy food prices and habits:
I am a working class American on food stamps, and I'd have to say yes, if I could afford more healthy foods over processed, I'd defintely try to eat mroe good stuff. Right now our income and alotment is so low, hot dogs and ramen which are nutritional wastelands filled with evil things keep us from going hungry through the month, whereas buying fresh stuff or things known to be not made with as much in the way of kilelr ingridients would mean we'd run out of food money within a couple of weeks, generally.

For people not in poverty like myself, part fo the cost issue may persist in that, here it's not as popular to eat what is in season. Seasonal foods are generally least expensive because they are abundant and can be obtained locally without the tacked on cost fo travel, etc. But here it's more common to just try to eat (and for stores to stock since it's what sells) your favorites, even if it has to be bussed in from Chile in winter. If more people learned to cook with the season as was done historically and still is in many countries, the diet and habits MIGHT improve.

Food stamps are tough. It's depressing to go to the store and realize that for the cost of one decent meal, you can get three meals' worth of cheap frozen pizzas. (It doesn't help that we don't have a working car anymore; it's hard to stock up and meal plan when you can only carry a few bags at a time.)

Speaking of food in the Japanese stereotypes thread, though: a friend of mine lived in Japan for a while, and was telling me about some of their stereotypically "weird" food, like natto and seafood ice cream. I asked him what American food Japanese people might find "weird," and he said, "Turkey."

Just something to think about.

It doesn't help that we seem incredibly informal compared to the rest of the world, what with us calling even our bosses and teachers by their first names a lot of the time and not really delineating in terms of age or "status" so much as opinions or personal achievement. Which is not to say that what we consider personal achievement is that great half the time *cough* Paris Hilton *cough*, but at least we make a surface effort to be more of a meritocracy.

Also it sucks that there's a combination of having no money for fresh food and not being in an area suited to growing your own. There are some community gardens in the city I live in, but not nearly enough to get affordable and nutritious food to all the people who need it.

Huh. I guess you don't see a bunch of turkey or even poultry farms around Japan, do you?

That's just it though, it's a cultural thing. It's not meant as an offense. Hell, half the informality is an attempt to cross perceived boundaries and become closer to other people! Class and caste systems divide people who are otherwise equal and could work and live beautifully together... In my opinion, anyway.

Sometimes, when I have the energy to work on it, I just plug seeds into my backyard! I can't grow enough to live on, but any supliment to the food supply is good, eh?

Oh yeah, I wouldn't trade our system for anything except a system that's even less judgmental about surface differences and the circumstances of people's birth compared to the rest of the world. America fuck yeah.

Depending on how much space you've got in your backyard it's possible to grow a surprising amount of food with a little know-how in terms of seasonal planting and making sure to grow things that get a lot of bang for their buck (kale is a big one). Learning how to pickle or otherwise can stuff is great for saving up your excess, too. And if you live in an area with relatively little pollution or pesticide use, there are a lot of wild plants to be foraged from spring to fall (dandelion greens, wild onions, clover and purslane are all very widespread across the US and very much edible).

If you really want to be adventurous and don't mind spending a little money, guinea pig and rabbits are both edible and easily kept in small spaces. If you can somehow acquire a chicken for egg-laying, it'd help for protein without activating squeamishness.

Why yes I do have a fount of survivalist knowledge in my brain what of it

Squash. Planted a couple butternut squash seed in my backyard. It took over. Had boxes of squash. I HATE SQUASH.

I wouldn't dare try wild food out here unless I tried to prepare nopales. I live ina large desert city and everything is eugh unless it can defend itself, liek cacti.

If I had to raise/kill my own meat, you'd never see someone go vegetarian so fast. I simply couldn't. No way.

Having survivalist knowledge is a virtue, IMO.

Squash thrives in the States because, along with beans and corn, it's basically our native crop and what Native Americans subsisted on for millennia. I highly recommend planting some beans as long as you like them.

I'm afraid that living in a temperate climate all my life means I have a big knowledge gap in terms of what tasty edible plants grow in desert environments aside from cacti. This seems like a good resource, though, as does this site and the video below.



Raising a chicken purely for eggs isn't bad, you don't have to eat the chicken when it gets old if you don't want to. You can even treat it as a pet.

Yeah, my plan for when I get old is pretty much to build a cabin with my own two hands and have a self-sustaining farmstead/workshop around it. It seems like a much smarter way to live as long as you have all the know-how, and it's not like our country doesn't have acres and acres of what's pretty much land for the relatively cheap taking.

Corn is hard because pests. EVERTHING like to eat corn before it's even ripe. You open the husk and there's some god-awful black worm THING in it. : ( Beans might be nice. I need a good trellas though.

Let me think off the top of my head... Flat paddle cacti we call prickly pears are extremely edible. The padles and especialy the fruit. There might be a few wild leafy plants like dandelion. ...Not a lot else as far as wild plants go springs to mind. I'm sure there's more, but not that I run upon daily, lol.

Actually, a LOT of people around here do raise chickens. We are overflowing with useless cats which makes this idea difficult. xD

Hey, nothing wrong with living off the map. I really couldn't live away from society though. I get paranoid anxiety issues if I feel too far away from the rest of the world.

I remember working at my high school right after graduating to get some work experience in the agricultural area.
Off of the top of my head, we grew tomatoes, figs, oranges and grapes. (it was great, because this was back when getting anything nutritional to eat was a serious chore). There was no better feeling than working in the hot sun for weeks and then finally reaping the rewards. On that note, grilled figs are fucking delicious.


Also raised a BUUUUNCH of animals. Chickens, goats, a turkey, a donkey, a BUNCH of rabbits, and a big ass obese pig that was most likely obese because everyone fed it terrible foods and wouldn't listen when I said that maybe it wasn't such a good idea.
her name was francine.
she died from being too fat. i cried for real.

The earth on my hometown is really fertile, most things will grow easily if you know how to handle them.
When I still had my pet parrot (I miss you baby ;n;) he'd sometimes throw his sunflower seeds to the grass in my grandma's garden.
The flowers grew without us noticing. Her garden also has this huge mango tree, a natural roof made out of a grape vine, and figs which birds like stealing.
Then again my grandma has a Green Thumb, so there's that.

growing plants is really rewarding and i am freakishly excited thinking about growing things.
but i can't because the neighbor likes to take care of stray cats that like to bring their cat butts over to our side of the fence. ;A;

A page late, but the talk of footbinding reminded me of these neck rings. Yes, these rings are still used to this day and some women can get necks up to 10 to 15 inches. They, personally, terrify me the most because if I was born a little farther north and in the border instead of south and in the city, I would probably have one of those on me.

Also, all this talk of food makes me incredibly glad both my parents work as chefs and get free food all the time. I mean it's mostly leftovers, but the only reason we go to the regular grocery store nowadays is for pet food.

As to accents, most of my younger life was spent in the middle of a school with three Asian Americans, one being me. I got very used to jabs about my eyes and my grades in math so I usually don't get offended when someone starts mocking me for whatever reason. They seem to stop pretty quickly once they realize I am entirely uninterested.

The term most linguist tend to use in place of 'ebonics' is African American Vernacular English or AAVE for short, just as an fyi.

I know from living in Virginia for the past 5 years (and living with a native Virginian,) that I do have a very distinct California accent/manner of speech, versus a Mid Atlantic/Virginia accent/vocabulary. Sometimes it's just little things, like tortillas vs shells, but we've just given up talking about the Air Conditioning, because I always talk about turning it down and he says turning it up, when they're the same thing. :)

The funny thing is, my SO will dial his accent up and down, depending on where he is and who he is talking to. When he talks to work people, it's much more clipped and generic, whereas when he starts talking to his parents it flattens out into a long almost-drawl. He totally does it unconsciously.

I think the Portland metro area has even "less" of an accent than California does. However, as my linguistics teacher said, the idea of accentless speech is something of a myth. It's kind of interesting to me how even though I'm from Portland, I have a couple dialectic elements of New England speech because that's where my dad and a lot of his family are from. For example, I use rotary and roundabout interchangeably, maybe even using rotary a little more often, even though the vast majority of people in the Pacific Northwest use roundabout. (Though they aren't super common here in general.)

By the way, here's an interesting survey that we did in our linguistics class about how we refer to various terms. We were questioned as to how we referred to the following:

a) a sweetened fizzy drink
b) a sale of unwanted items held on your porch or in your yard
c) rubber-soled shoes that you'd wear in the gym
d) a big road that you drive fairly fast on
e) a sandwich, usually filled with cold meat or cheese, served on a long bun
f) the covered area in front of the front door of a house, usually up a couple of steps
g) a summer insect that flies and has a rear section that glows in the dark
h) a wheeled contraption for carrying groceries in the supermarket

This is a quote from the Learning Japanese thread.
I decided to bring it here because I thought of something once this was brought up. There are plenty of otome games, but for the most part, they seem kind of separated from Male > Female dating sims. How do I word this...
It just occurred to me that there will most likely never be a female version of Love Plus or its later versions because it seems like it's more...acceptable for men to have a girlfriend that you can treat like a real person. It's hard to verbalize what I'm thinking, so forgive me if this comes out a bit wrong.

Obviously, there are girls that play these types of games. Otherwise, there wouldn't be even close to the library selection that there is. But I mean, there's a sort of line that I think they don't expect females to cross? Like, you can have dating sims for both of the sexes, but going so far as to basically have a virtual boyfriend to the extent that Love Plus takes it to is unheard of. Instead of going through this novel route and then coming to a conclusion and starting all over again (basically reading a book), it continues on into forever. And this girl changes for you, the player. It's just interesting to even try to think of Japan going "YEAH OKAY LET'S MAKE A FEMALE VERSION OF THIS". Can you imagine talking to a virtual guy and having him change himself depending on what you say?

I feel like there's some social commentary to go on here, but I can't find the right words to say it! D:
Mostly, "it's acceptable to make a game where a woman will do whatever it takes to make her man happy, but a man doing the same thing is unheard of". For some reason, that weight game also comes to mind. Hitomi wants to lose weight for herself because it's healthy, but just thinking about how these guys won't like her until she changes herself makes me sad. :<

A) Soda
B) Yard Sale
C) SNEAKS.
D) um. a highway? i don't... i don't know?
E) A sub? A large sandwich???
F) Porch
G) Lightnin' bug/Firefly
H) Trolley was my first thought, followed by shopping cart.

I'm not a native speaker, so this probably won't say anything about me. Whatever, I wanna do it.

a) Lemonade
b) Garage sale
c) Trainers
d) Motorway
e) Sub
f) Veranda
g) Firefly
h) Trolley

WHAT

Edit: I guess it's only fair if I answer too.

a) Soda
b) Yard sale
c) Sneakers
d) Highway
e) Hoagie
f) Porch
g) Firefly (I was raised calling these lightning bugs, though... not sure when or why I made the switch but it's very possibly because of the show)
h) Shopping cart

a) Coke (oh god I've lived in the south too long; if you asked me two years ago I'd say "soda")
b) garage sale
c) sneakers
d) highway
e) sub
f) porch
g) firefly
h) shopping cart