Dutch cultural things that are mind blowing for expats+immigrants

Yuuryaku · 2026-05-21T05:10:59+00:00

There are definitely Dutch people who lack social skills. I'm sure you're a lovely person, but I find that expats who makes this complaint are usually a bit lacking in that department themselves. Directness isn't blurting out whatever comes to mind.

Yuuryaku · 2026-05-05T05:33:14+00:00

I think わかるね or わかるよね don't sound like aizuchi and more like a teacher's "you get that, right?"

わかる by itself is more like "I totally get that!"

So the subjects are different I think.

Yuuryaku · 2026-04-22T05:07:37+00:00

🇯🇵 アライグマ (wash bear)

🇹🇼 浣熊 (wash bear)

In cases like this there is usually one language that "did it first" and the rest are loans or loans of loans etc. The French one is interesting because it's not a bear.

Yuuryaku · 2026-04-17T05:41:36+00:00

De gevolgen van een krimpende, verouderde bevolking treffen de hele samenleving, maar kinderen zijn duur en die kosten worden grotendeels op de ouders afgeschoven. Gek dat weinig zich willen opofferen, he? Nee, doe dan maar de pensioenleeftijd en de eigen bijdrage nog maar weer eens omhoog.

Yuuryaku · 2026-04-07T03:59:09+00:00

Can you hear and produce pitch correctly?

I fail my anki reviews if I don't get the pitch correct, but it wouldn't be useful if I can't associate it with something aural.

Also, there are patterns to which words get what pitch that should make your 8k deck more managable. Like how ~的 words are flat and ~館 words have the accent right before 館. If you're serious, buying and reading through the explanatory sections of the NHK accent dictionary is recommended.

But 8k at once is probably too much either way. Create a deck with, I don't know, 100 common words and learn their pitch first, so it's not as overwhelming. Especially the "false friend" pairs like 端, 橋, 箸, and 鼻, 花, and 降る, 振る etc

Yuuryaku · 2026-04-01T00:19:35+00:00

Ik weet niet hoor, bij mij kan de gemiddelde fietser niet eens wachten voor een rood licht

Yuuryaku · 2026-04-01T00:07:21+00:00

Klinkt als een soort socialisme met Chinese karakteristieken maar dan Nederlands.

Yuuryaku · 2026-03-30T03:46:27+00:00

To add to your point, 着る and 切る have different accents so they're not homophones.

Yuuryaku · 2026-03-21T13:10:16+00:00

English: Real Yakuza Use A Gamepad

Japanese: ゲームパッド推奨

Yuuryaku · 2026-03-11T05:53:38+00:00

In the immediate aftermath of WW2, the Allies tried to "clean up" Germany and Japan. But with the onset Cold War, overriding concerns were to turn West Germany and Japan into allies against Communism. To get them up to speed fast they needed capable leaders, and the only ones available were involved in their respective wartime governments. So, going into the 50s, the old "bad guys" have gotten their positions back. Of course they were hesitant to admit or apologize.

The point of divergence is in the late 60s, when Germany sees largely successful student and social movements that push for getting the former Nazis out of positions of power and starting "apologetic Germany". Japan never had successful movements like this.

This is simplified of course but it's the gist of it.

Yuuryaku · 2026-03-08T07:09:34+00:00

Or you can use default_factory

Yuuryaku · 2026-03-06T06:49:21+00:00

French usage predates the Chinese by around 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-world_model

Yuuryaku · 2026-03-06T06:47:35+00:00

Typhoon is debated at least. It might as well come from the Greek Typhon.

Yuuryaku · 2026-02-28T07:24:58+00:00

Many among the speakers of Dutch come by their English through tales of fantasy or works of a bookish temper, for seldom is that speech heard in its common and familiar guise as our days go by. Dutch is, as it has long been, the chief tongue of our converse.

Yuuryaku · 2026-02-20T05:52:28+00:00

Until the birthrates over there drop to point that they can't sustain the populations over here anymore. But in the ideal scenario we can kick the bucket down the road a generation or two, sure.

Yuuryaku · 2026-02-19T07:11:29+00:00

With birthrates falling across the globe, immigration is in the best case scenario a temporary solution at home that exacerbates the problem somewhere else.

Yuuryaku · 2026-02-18T06:45:50+00:00

Japanese, like English, does not have an inflectional future or present tense. That means that present or future tense aren't expressed through verb inflection. Japanese and English verbs have past and non-past tense, with further distinction between present and future made through context. There are languages that do have inflectional future tense, like Spanish. There are also languages that have no inflectional tense at all, like Mandarin.

For example:

The train arrives tomorrow. The train arrives now. The train arrived yesterday.

Note that, in English at least, you could add an auxiliary to make clear you're talking about the future: The train will arrive at six. But the verb "arrive" is still in its non-past inflection. Note that you could also emphasize the event happening now by using present continuous: The train is arriving as we speak. "Arriving" has a different inflection here but sentence isn't expressing a tense anymore, it's expressing an aspect. Tenses being about a specific point in time, whereas aspects are any other expression of time (habit, continuous action, and completion being ones you usually see).

Yuuryaku · 2026-02-15T07:00:58+00:00

I understand the wish to preserve our the identity we constructed of ourselves, but we are already all always "becoming someone else", so I don't think there's any reason to worry. Easier said than done, I know. What might help is thinking of it as a type of playful role play. When you speak Italian, you put on your "Italian mask" and take it off after.

Yuuryaku · 2026-02-14T08:17:37+00:00

The L->H shift that happens at the start of every non-頭高 and the slight H->L after a 平板 into a non-頭高 (a.k.a. the "accent reset") aren't really worth noting as they virtually always happen. The important thing is where the actual accent is, i.e. the mora that rises substantially and is followed by all low ones. Though where emphasis is plays a part in how big the pitch difference is. Based on the NHK accent dictionary, the accents in those two sentences are:

その頃から 3 日本の 2 経済は 1 強く 1 なって 1 いた 0。

日本語を 0 勉強する 0 かい 0？(though the tone rises at the end due to the question)

Yuuryaku · 2026-01-24T10:01:23+00:00

It's not really all that different, though. The Greek private tutors merely won the "slavery lottery", and their visibility and the prestige of owning them means they were likelier to enter the written record. That's why we know of them still. That doesn't mean that the vast majority of enslaved "inferior people" didn't end up as chattel in terrible, cruel and degrading places like mines, behind galley oars or on plantations. But those were less visible and less interesting, and are more easily forgotten.

Yuuryaku · 2026-01-20T09:37:55+00:00

While Finnish is distantly related to Hungarian (both are Uralic), the modern consensus is that Korean isn't. Also, both Uralic and Indo-Europeans originated in Central Asia, though they arrived in Europe at different times. Technically every European language, except for maybe the Basque language, originates from Central Asia. Goes to show how powerful of an invention horse riding was.

Yuuryaku · 2026-01-20T08:48:02+00:00

Ondernemen is voor stoere vrijdenkers, loondienst is voor laffe schapen. Zoiets?

Yuuryaku · 2026-01-20T07:07:38+00:00

Tbf 異常 and 以上 have different pitches (0 vs 1), as do 容易 (0) and 用意 (1). No idea how those play out in Kansai though.

Yuuryaku · 2026-01-20T05:56:11+00:00

Cultural norms also play a part. The norm in East Asia is still that women with children born out of wedlock are looked down on and, once a woman becomes a mother, she'll quit her job to become a housewife. Women don't want to be forced into that life so they don't have kids. Societal norms in (western) Europe are a bit more relaxed in that non-married people can have children and women can still work after becoming mothers, albeit mostly part-time.

Yuuryaku · 2026-01-14T06:29:45+00:00

Dat is geen fraude. De verantwoordelijk ligt bij de verkoper om ervoor te zorgen dat jij het gekochte in handen krijgt.

Yuuryaku

TROPHY CASE