On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 06:27 +0200, lee wrote: > You need to realise that native speakers of English have a tendency to > be overly polite and to expect others to be just as overly polite as > they are, in ways non-native speakers of English mostly cannot fathom > (at least Germans cannot). At the same time, non-native speakers of > English (at least Germans) can come across to native speakers of > English > as utterly rude, without any intention to come across like that and > without knowing that they do. --- For example, what I just wrote is > probably somewhat rude, without me intending to be. It's because I'm > German, and the totally different mindsets of English and German > "collide", which would make it extremely complicated and requiring a > great deal of elaboration to put it in such a way that it doesn't seem > rude. I think you're over-generalizing here. In my experience German speakers are just as polite as English speakers, especially if their English is as good as yours. Possibly some may come across as rude when their English is less good, as when one is learning a language one tends to say things more bluntly due to feeling more restricted, but it can also work the other way, when the beginner appears to be overly formal. Idiomatic expression and fleeting cultural references account for a huge proportion of everyday speech and a lot of that bleeds into written communication. In my experience, national stereotypes are an unreliable guide in everyday life, though one thing that does seem to be different from one culture to another is the kind of thing they find funny. But that's another story. poc -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
