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Maes

Intercultural advantage

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Has anyone here ever benefitted from something that came from a culture different than his own? I'm asking more about things such as proverbs, mannerism, habits, etc. which somehow proved "superior" in another culture.

Some examples:

In Greece there's no equivalent for the "Thirty days hath September..." mnemonic, so don't consider it strange if people seem a bit slow when it comes to remember each month's duration. I on the other hand, having half-Greek half-Italian heritage, had access to the Italian version of the mnemonic "Trenta giorni ha Settembre..." and could find a month's duration with lightning-quick speed compared to everone else. When asked how I did it, I just recited the mnemonic translated in Greek (which worked out pretty well, I wonder why we don't have it) and I received a mix of incredulity and awe as if I had discovered fire or something...oh well.

Same thing with the "ELI the ICE man" mnemonic, for the electric engineers among us. Perhaps it only makes immediate sense for English speakers, but I found it incredibly concise and useful and much better than any other mnemonic (or lack thereof) aimed at remembering current/voltage relationships.

Curiously, during my uni years in Italy, I was the only one using the "right hand rule" for solving electromagnetism physics exercises. While I was taught that rule in Greece in junior high already, I saw none of my course companions using it in Italy, which resulted in them spending a lot of time to figure out vectors on paper or through calculations, while it just took a split second for me.

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I can't recall any time this has happened to me, although I haven't done anything outside the US where I could use a mnemonic or at least something that's helped me remember stuff.

The only thing I can think of that might apply is using PEMDAS when dealing with algebra, but I've never had the chance to see if it is used in any other culture (AFAIK it could be used everywhere o_O )

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Kirby said:

The only thing I can think of that might apply is using PEMDAS when dealing with algebra, but I've never had the chance to see if it is used in any other culture (AFAIK it could be used everywhere o_O )


Wow, thanks, another thing I can use! Of course we are taught the order of operations at school, but in a slower and more painstaking way.

Sometimes I wonder if certain languages are inherently more suitable or even outright superior to others in particular areas, especially sciences and conveying new ideas/describing stuff. English for example typically forms very short, unambiguous sentences and lends itself very well to catchy acronyms.

On the other hand, when I had to translate parts of my own pregraduate research publications (written in English) for my thesis (in Greek), I ran into several problems including the lack of standardized technical terms, and the need to lengthen and w rite a lot of sentences in a much more verbose and dilute manner.

Also, certain sentences using antonyms were perfectly unambiguous in English, but as soon as they were translated in Greek most people found them difficult to understand, since they couldn't relate antonyms with the proper subject/object if it was a couple of sentences behind!

Also, many ad-hoc "catchy acronyms" that worked so well in the English version looked awkward or just butt-ugly in the Greek one (I was even told that it was bad practice for a Greek, but not for an English publication, go figure!)

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Maes said:

Sometimes I wonder if certain languages are inherently more suitable or even outright superior to others in particular areas, especially sciences and conveying new ideas/describing stuff.

We should all fucking speak Lojban! No exceptions.

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TheeXile said:

We should all fucking speak Lojban! No exceptions.


Heh let's not open that can of worms...

...back on topic, perhaps it's just the quality of the educational system or something. I could pretty much sum up the Greek Educational system in a sentence: you just learn how to spell and write down your name, learn to do some essential daily life calculations, get History and Religion shoved down your throat in abundance and that's about it.

None ever bothered, as far as I can remember, teaching us any easy mnemonics or stimulating learning or the very least, memorization (but even a mnemonic acronym has some stimulus value, while just ordering a child to "learn everything" is dull).

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Being an American, the government protected me from any outside cultural influences that could compromise the purity of my mind, soul, and precious bodily essences. So no, not really.

Being an Anglophile, though, I find myself speaking Queen's English fairly often...with an American accent. People look at me weird when I say "oh bollocks".

Also, I've never found any mnemonic devices to ever be useful. Except that one "red touches yellow, you're okay fellow...red touches black, you're dead Jack". I think I'm gonna go pet a milk snake now.

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Please
Excuse
My
Dear
Aunt
Sally

For order of preference in math equations. Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.

SOHCAHTOA

For sine = opposite/hypoteneuse, cosine = adjacent/hypoteneuse and tangent = opposite/adjacent.

HOMES

For the Great Lakes. Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. This one doesn't work too well, because I had to look them up just now.

And of course, "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down."

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Bucket said:

Please
Excuse
My
Dear
Aunt
Sally

For order of preference in math equations. Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.

I recall being taught BODMAS instead of PEMDAS.

(B)rackets
(O)rder
(D)ivision
(M)ultiplication
(A)ddition
(S)ubtraction

Think I prefer your version though.

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Maes said:

which somehow proved "superior" in another culture.

Plenty. There's very little we have original, unless it's primitive.

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Danarchy said:

Being an Anglophile, though, I find myself speaking Queen's English fairly often...with an American accent. People look at me weird when I say "oh bollocks".


Reminds me of a funny line from a song...

"I speak the Queen's English cos I'm from Queen's"

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I just read the whole thing and I can't understand one single thing you said...
English is my second language.
Stoned is my current status.

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Maes said:

In Greece there's no equivalent for the "Thirty days hath September..." mnemonic, so don't consider it strange if people seem a bit slow when it comes to remember each month's duration. I on the other hand, having half-Greek half-Italian heritage, had access to the Italian version of the mnemonic "Trenta giorni ha Settembre..." and could find a month's duration with lightning-quick speed compared to everone else. When asked how I did it, I just recited the mnemonic translated in Greek (which worked out pretty well, I wonder why we don't have it) and I received a mix of incredulity and awe as if I had discovered fire or something...oh well.

Knuckle method is much easier.

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DuckReconMajor said:

Knuckle method is much easier.


Cool! I am more and more convinced that the complete lack of such mnemonics indicates an indifferent educational system, and a generalized "fuck that" attitude when it comes to learning to do things more efficiently, both of which actually very true for my poor country :-p

The closest thing I remember to a mnemonic is one that was half-assedly mentioned to us by a high school chemistry teacher, but that's it. I had to find one of my own to remember the elements' electron valence.

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So I'm from Connecticut, and I was staying in a hippie laden hostel in San Francisco. There were two British girls there, and a couple from Oregon, myself, and my girlfriend at the time. We were playing drinking games, and we ran out of beer, so in my New England vernacular I said, "Let's go to the packy and pick up a twelve rack of Sam."

The couple from Oregon looked at me confused like.

The two British girls stared at me with mouth agape.

To them, I had said a racial slur: "Paki," IE., Pakistani people.

What I was really saying was "let's go to the package (liquor) store and buy a 12 pack of Samuel Adams beer."

I don't know if that's an advantage per se, but it's certainly an interesting difference in usage.

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Oi mate, check out the knockers on that bird, ey?

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Or the always appropriate question out of the hotel bellhop, "At what time would you like us to knock you up, miss?"

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Shaikoten said:

To them, I had said a racial slur: "Paki," IE., Pakistani people.


that's a racial slur? I never knew....

then I guess this is similar to how "gypsy" became a slur and the "correct" form, "Roma", came into place.

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double post but...



My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas


PIZZAS


PIZZAS. You hear that, scientific world?

I SAID PIZZAS.

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exp(x) said:

You can pretend all you want, but Pluto is not a planet.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=216998


yes because planet was undefined until 2006, right?

It's still a planet. A "Dwarf" planet, but it is still a planet.
Eris is too.

I guarantee you that this year will see the inclusion of these planets due to constant redefinitions, which would give us way more than 9, I assure you.

seriously, the bigger your orbit, the harder it is to clear it.

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exp(x) said:
You can pretend all you want, but Pluto is not a planet.

The IAU blew their chance to create a clear definition of "planet" that would apply to all star systems, not just our own. But apparently the fact that this would make Charon and Ceres and a bunch of other asteroids and trans-Plutonian objects planets must have offended some astronomers*, so they had to add artificial terms to the definition to ensure that the eight classical planets -- and only the eight classical planets -- would be considered "planets". "Cleared the neighborhood"? WTF does that mean?!?!

* Maybe no one wanted to come up with a 200-word mnemonic to replace the one Csonicgo quoted. Or to replace it every time a new planet was discovered in an orbit between those of two previous ones...

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There does have to be some kind of lower limit as to what we call a planet, or pretty soon we would be teaching kids the names of minor asteroids in 4th grade astronomy.

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Quasar said:

There does have to be some kind of lower limit as to what we call a planet, or pretty soon we would be teaching kids the names of minor asteroids in 4th grade astronomy.

There's no need to teach kids the names of every planet if there's 200 of them. You could teach the names of just the classical planets and even they are pretty much just trivia.

As for lower limit, "deforms into sphere under own gravity and orbits a star, not another planet" sounds just fine to me.

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Csonicgo said:

My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas

The one that I used to use was My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets.

I can't remember the new one that we use in school now. Actually, I'm not very good with mnemonics. I spend more time trying to remember the mnemonics than I do what the mnemonic is supposed to help with.

Anyway, a few more

Richard Of York Gave Battle In vain: colours of the rainbow. Though my teacher told me the much simpler name "Roy G. Biv" for the same thing.

Mrs Freg: Move, Reproduce, Sense, Feed, Respire, Excrete, Grow (characteristics of living things as taught in early school)

SLUT: Scales, Labels, Units, Title, how to set up a graph.

"I Prefer Mince And Tatties" probably only works well in Scotland due to the use of the word "tatties" (potatoes) as I'm not sure how universal that word is. What's it for? The phases of cell division: interpahse, prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase.

And a suggestion that one of my students came up with this year for remembering the main basic phases of speciation - Isolation, Mutation, Natural Selection: I munch native sperm. O_O

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Csonicgo said:

yes because planet was undefined until 2006, right?

It's still a planet. A "Dwarf" planet, but it is still a planet.
Eris is too.

I guarantee you that this year will see the inclusion of these planets due to constant redefinitions, which would give us way more than 9, I assure you.

seriously, the bigger your orbit, the harder it is to clear it.

Let me know when you're an astrophysicist.

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Enjay said:

Richard Of York Gave Battle In vain: colours of the rainbow. Though my teacher told me the much simpler name "Roy G. Biv" for the same thing.

I always wondered why they allowed a tertiary color into the official spectrum.

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I think the point with Pluto is that when it was discovered, it was pretty much at the limit of what we could detect with the telescopes/technology that we had. Since then, we've found that in many respects it doesn't fit in with the characteristics of the other things that we consider to be "planets", and isn't even particularly unique. Because of this, it makes sense to redefine it. It's really just a reflection of our increased knowledge of the universe.

Of course, for years now all children have been taught that there are nine planets and that Pluto is one of them. It's not particularly surprising that there is a collective sentimental attachment to the idea of Pluto as a planet.

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fraggle said:

Of course, for years now all children have been taught that there are nine planets and that Pluto is one of them. It's not particularly surprising that there is a collective sentimental attachment to the idea of Pluto as a planet.


An American Sentiment. Remember, this was an AMERICAN discovery. Everyone went nuts to change the science books for the new AMERICAN discovery. Even Walt Disney got on the bandwagon and named a character after it. NASA called it the "true-blue American planet".



So what do we do now? toss it in the can?

Enjay said:

"I Prefer Mince And Tatties" probably only works well in Scotland due to the use of the word "tatties" (potatoes) as I'm not sure how universal that word is. What's it for? The phases of cell division: interpahse, prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase.


Taters!

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