
Love in Translation: Learning about culture, communication, and intimacy - wallflower
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/08/lauren-collins-learns-to-love-in-french
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ap22213
Maybe it's a reflection of my circumstances - but this reminds me more of a
difference in class than language. I was born to two uneducated parents in a
poor, rural coal town in Pennsylvania and then later married a woman whose
parents were educated and wealthy and whose family had been at least upper-
middle class for generations.

To me, at times, I feel her and I speak different languages, use different
words, have different intonation and expressions and idioms - in both behavior
as well as language. My 'pensyl-tucky' accent and manners, mostly worn away
from living elsewhere, still betrays to other American English speakers that I
may be of a 'lesser kind'. I have no idea of the author's background, but her
description of it sounds closer to 'lower class' American - one in which
persona hasn't been formed by years of restraint, discipline, obedience, and
expectation. Whereas, her husband seems more like he would be from a
wealthier, urban American family. And, inferring from his families' fleeing
Spain during the Marxist revolution, maybe it goes back a bit.

When I travelled to Paris for the first time with my wife and her family, they
asked me what I thought. I told them that it seemed more similar to any
American city than that American city would seem to where I had grown up. And,
they seemed shocked that I would say such a thing. But, having had to fit into
their culture (not the other way around), I sometimes feel like a foreigner.

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sukh
Thank you for writing about this.

Unfortunately, study [1] shows that children who grow up in less wealthy
households, know 18000 fewer words by the time they are 5 than a child that
grows up in a wealthy family leaving a very clear disadvantage early on.

[1] The Beginning of Life

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ap22213
That's interesting. Why would they learn fewer words? Do the less wealthy just
talk less? Or, do they learn other words that are then culled from their
vocabulary?

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roel_v
There is no way to say this without sounding like an asshole, so I'll just
forego trying to sugarcoat it: I can read perezhilton.com without ever having
to look up a word. Reading the Economist, I have to look up at least one word
every week. Growing up, I never knew a single person reading the Economist or
the equivalent; while reading the spatial-and-temporal equivalent of
perezhilton.com was though of (by my larger environment, not my nuclear family
luckily) as something that was almost intellectual, because hey, it was
_reading_.

(I'm a non-native English speaking currently middle class European from a
semi-rural area and from a working class background)

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noir_lord
A fascinating read, I recently started dating someone who is Hungarian, I'm
British (subtype: English, subsubtype: Yorkshireman) and I've really enjoyed
the cultural differences between dating someone from my own culture and
someone from hers.

Did lead to the the strangest complement I've ever ever received - "You are
the least English Englishman I've ever met"

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doe88
I can tell you that's a very detailed article from someone whom might be
struggling learning french but is nonetheless very knowledgeable about french
culture and its intricacies.

