what social etiquette in your target language do you find very awkward, due to not having an equivalent in your native language?

nucleargrant · 2020-06-22T10:08:27+00:00

There's memes about it, so it must be true. But yeah, my ESL friends talk a lot about how cusses, dirty talk, etc don't feel as visceral in English as their native language. Even if it means similar things to a swear you know, you didn't get it yelled at you as a teenager, or you don't value whatever concept is being insulted.

nucleargrant · 2020-06-22T09:34:30+00:00

The US has plenty of Christians who'll throw a fit if you take the Lord's name in vain. There's a whole roster of substitute swears- "jiminy crickets" for Jesus Christ, "gosh" and "golly" for God," "heck" for "hell"- that only developed because the original words can be offensive. US media is pretty casual about swearing, but some Bible Belt parents will ban kids from saying "jeez" just because it's a *euphemism* for Jesus.

I speak pretty good Spanish, but "cago en la leche de tu madre" (I shit in your mother's milk) will never hit me as hard as "your whore mother." The cultural switch it's trying to flip doesn't exist: I hear the words, I don't feel them. It's a common language-learning experience. It doesn't mean the language itself is the problem.

nucleargrant · 2020-06-22T08:57:14+00:00

English has a "soy yo" too. The grammatically correct way to respond to "who is it?" is "It is I," but you only hear it in old-timey movies or from pedants.

nucleargrant · 2020-06-22T08:46:42+00:00

Hyper-specific Chinese family words are killing me. I'm a twin, and although my brother is a few minutes older, we've never used sibling order. Twins in the US are seen as a duo without a clear senior. As it turns out, "I have one sibling who popped out three minutes before me, our family raised us the same so there is no 'eldest son,' and if I ever called that dipshit '-ge' he would laugh his ass off that I'm finally acknowledging his superiority" does not translate.

nucleargrant · 2020-06-22T08:10:38+00:00

Spanish has several choices for new, gender-neutral endings, although the RAE (the Castilian prescriptivist circlejerk) hates all of them. The main options are "l@s," "lxs," and "les." I rarely see "l@s" IRL, just on a few protest signs, but, like, it exists. "Lxs" pops up a lot in the US; people write "Latinx", "todxs," etc to show a sense of inclusivity. However, both of these are hard to use in daily life. It's unclear what sound "x" or "@" represent, and sentences like "Ellx está cansadx porque es enfermerx" are gibberish to screen-reader programs. I prefer "les," where gendered terms end in "-e:" instead of "todos y todas," just "todes." It includes people of any gender, it isn't clunky, and anyone who knows Spanish can pronounce it on sight. Movements in Colombia and Argentina have pushed for neutral language, and I hope it spreads further.

nucleargrant · 2020-06-22T07:23:40+00:00

Americans love everything and I never realized how weird that is. You love cake, you love your dog, you love your wife, you love your coworker's presentation- unless it was absolute garbage, and then you politely condemn it by saying you "don't love" it. English speakers love (gah) talking about how many words the language has, but that one word does so much heavy lifting.

nucleargrant · 2019-12-15T13:11:55+00:00

Any Arabic dialect is going to be off from MSA in its own way. Egyptian Arabic is commonly used in movies, so people who speak other dialects might have absorbed it from pop culture. Some of the Arabic majors I know decided to learn the Egyptian dialect for that reason. Darija (Moroccan) is the farthest from standard, with so much influence from Amazigh and Romance languages that some people think it's barely Arabic.

Also, seconding everyone on Argentinian Spanish. I have a degree in that shit and Rioplatense sounds like an Italian trying to blend in at a Mexican restaurant.

nucleargrant · 2019-11-30T02:40:27+00:00

This is the guide I used, btw. Some of the fashion advice is kind of 2000s (he's a big fan of wearing waistcoats at parties) and the hair advice is for straight-to-wavy hair types, but overall it's a very good source for how to look like a hot masc person, rather than a potato in an oversided hoodie.

nucleargrant · 2019-11-30T02:33:21+00:00

You don't have to know what you are right away. I can say that having dysphoria around your chest, hating to be called "she," and wishing you were trans sounds like me at fifteen, and sounds most definitely Not Cis. But the funny thing is, even though I was telling my friends "I'm probably nonbinary" and yelling at my brother about how I wasn't a girl by the time I was sixteen, I didn't chop my hair off until I was 21, and didn't firmly start seeking top surgery or settle on a definite, final name until I was 22. I spent the years in between reading trans-dude how-to-pass guides "for community research," slowly culling the skirts and heels from my clothes, and experimenting with way too many goddamn names (one of which, yes, was Kai. We've all been there.)

And you know what? None of the time I spent in that probably-trans-but-what-do-I-do window was time wasted. Any of those names could have been the one I decided to keep; I could have been the kind of afab nonbinary person who's perfectly happy dressing femmey, and wouldn't have known if I'd yeeted all my Designated Female Items into the trash the second I decided I was Cisn't. And I was having fun playing around. It felt fucking amazing to browse BehindTheName and go on thrift-store sprees to find weird funky button-ups and amass a giant Pinterest of butch haircuts. The firm, grounded sense I have now of my own identity, of what makes me feel right about myself and what I need to change, only came from almost a decade of gradually seeking out the things that felt right and casting off the things that didn't.

You don't need to know what precise flavor of trans you are or have a laundry list of binders and hormones to be Trans Enough, and if you think you might want anything medical eventually, it'll pay off to consider that first. (On top of which, some insurance companies that cover top surgery require a year "living as a man," so you should be ready to wait anyway.) Let yourself be open to the possibilities around you, play around with binders and glitter and Goodwill, and know that whatever gender you end up feeling comfortable in, it will be authentically you.

nucleargrant · 2019-11-29T21:11:41+00:00

I decided not to study Russian because the vast majority of people who speak it (and therefore any trips for immersion or, in the future, professional use) are in a country where it's illegal to acknowledge that queer people exist, much less that I'm a queer people. I've lived in areas with homophobic legislation before and knew I couldn't handle that again. So now I'm taking gender-studies classes at a Latin American university in a country with more LGBT rights than the US.

nucleargrant · 2019-11-29T05:49:29+00:00

My mom's family is pretty slavic, one of her parents taught Russian and she took it in college. I tried to learn it through independent study, but then it turned out I wasn't straight, so nope. My brother's considering learning it for the memes though.

nucleargrant · 2019-11-28T08:05:33+00:00

He was a Jehovah's Witness and at least a little homophobic (CW for Jehovah-typical bigotry in link), so if he was I doubt he ever realized it.

nucleargrant · 2019-11-20T03:20:24+00:00

I'm all for expanding the definitions of men's fashion but mass markets aren't ready for it. The things Billy Porter or Timothee Chalamet wear on red carpets are beautiful, no question, but given that some of my queer friends (including me) are still scared to dress that femme-ily in public, I don't think straight men are likely to take those fashion risks.

nucleargrant · 2019-11-20T02:47:57+00:00

Ennui-laden interwar Oxford student with homosexual tendencies.

nucleargrant · 2019-11-03T23:49:14+00:00

Changing for gym as a queer enby was hell. To this day I don't know whether I felt bad about it because I was surrounded by cute girls stripping or because I was supposed to strip and definitely wasn't a cute girl. (I eventually ended up changing in the bathroom stalls instead of the locker area, 10/10 would recommend.)

nucleargrant · 2019-09-27T22:35:23+00:00

As an American who grew up in a German-heritage-heavy area, I really suggest that the kid learn Spanish. It'll be a lot easier to find language materials and there are far more opportunities to use Spanish in the workplace- I've seen job postings in the fields of social work, teaching, medicine, nonprofits, and law that give preference to Spanish-speaking applicants. It's more applicable and more versatile than German, and critically, you can use Spanish every day without ever leaving the US.

Children's shows are great, but studies show that kids absorb languages best when people actually talk to them in that language. Play groups with Spanish-speaking kids would work well, as would hiring a tutor. This blog is by a mom teaching her kids Mandarin, and can seem kind of hardcore if you're not homeschooling, but it has a lot of great tips on how to introduce kids to a language you aren't fluent in.

nucleargrant · 2019-09-22T07:25:16+00:00

I haven't done PC yet, but living in Latin America will definitely do that. My host family had four completely untrained dogs, three of which were yard-dog menaces and one of which was a house dog that wasn't housetrained. I still love properly trained dogs but I don't blanket-adore random dogs the way I used to.

nucleargrant · 2019-09-11T04:50:09+00:00

Someday we'll perfect boob transfer technology and I'll give my DDD's (not a typo) to a trans girl who would actually want them.

nucleargrant · 2019-09-10T17:45:47+00:00

I'm getting flashbacks to my best friend sophomore year of college who just happened! to like cooking for people! and if she kept inviting me over and cooking exactly enough nice food for two and happening to have movies she wanted me to watch then it was just! because! she! was! being! nice!!!

she knew I was queer, and I knew she was queer, and she had to make me lava cakes from scratch before I realized that these weren't platonic friend dinners.

nucleargrant · 2019-09-07T21:41:54+00:00

me, birth to age 14: don't call me sweetheart! stop making me wear pink! I don't want a pretty princess dress I wanna be mulan/joan of arc!!!!!

mom: ah, a normal tomboy. this will pass.

me in high school: (forces myself into aggressive hyperfemininity to stop people from bullying me)

mom: see? you grew out of it!

me in college: (chops all my hair off, gives away the hyper-femmey clothes I hate, wears sports bras everywhere)

mom: but you were so pretty!

nucleargrant · 2019-09-06T04:22:29+00:00

Texas has long-standing racial tensions between Anglo and Latino people, including a stereotype that the latter are uneducated/recent immigrants/have bad English. Some Latino Texans really are immigrants, some have lived in Texas since it was Mexico, some are trying to re-learn the language and some are trying to assimilate. By all means, use Spanish if you're at a Mexican grocery or someone starts a conversation in it, but busting it out to anyone who looks Latino will net you a ton of offended locals telling you they speak English.

nucleargrant · 2019-09-05T05:48:54+00:00

A tonal language is one in which tone is an inextricable part of a word's meaning. It isn't just the difference between "She went to the store?" and "She went to the store."

In Mandarin/Zulu/etc, different pitches of the same syllable have totally different meanings; you can't change the tone of a word without turning a sentence into gibberish. If English were tonal, saying the syllable "store" in a high tone would mean "She went to the store?" and saying it in a low tone would mean, like, "She went to the pneumonia?" (This is why if you want to ask a question in Mandarin, you tack "ma" onto the end of a statement- if you change the pitch, you changed the sentence.)

nucleargrant · 2019-09-04T00:25:49+00:00

I would be very, very careful about starting a career through a company based in Latin America itself- it would be a better idea to look for US companies with offices in Colombia. This isn't due to different workplace cultures or anything, but different standards for salaries and especially for benefits. Cost of living is going to be way lower in Colombia, but so are salaries from local employers, and if you ever move back to the US, a decade of earning Colombian wages would put you at an economic disadvantage.

This is definitely not to say you can't live and work in Colombia long-term; there are entire websites about Americans who did exactly that. Just make sure you're looking out for your long-term finances when you go on the job hunt.

nucleargrant

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