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I asked a Vietnamese woman if she wanted to play board games at a cafe with me. She got very upset and stormed off. 2 hours later, she messaged me: "sorry, I w
by itake 14d ago
I asked a Vietnamese woman if she wanted to play board games at a cafe with me.
She got very upset and stormed off. 2 hours later, she messaged me: "sorry, I was rude, but I will not go to the casino with you."
Common language, culture, and context makes a more peaceful world.
- jagenabler2 14d agoIt also makes a boring one. Friction is where interesting experiences, stories, and cultures are born.
- itake 14d agoThe friction in my story resulted in 2 unhappy people, a relationship lost, when what should have been fun experience for both.
- globular-toast 14d agoThere is no light without shade. These experiences are necessary for you to appreciate the people you actually mesh with. People are more than just ChatGPT with a vagina.
- bluebarbet 14d agoPresumably there are other stories of linguistic mishap that resulted in 2 happy people and a friendship or marriage. You got unlucky.
- patcon 7d agoHaha I like this complexity. It's also very "meta" and recursive to be having this discussion about the term "friction" itself...! I hope the irony is at least interesting, and you both feel better and/or worse off for it ;)
- someguynamedq 14d agoI can imagine more interesting pass times than failing to communicate
- elliotec 14d ago[flagged]
- alephnerd 14d agoMy SO is Vietnamese and a Bac Si trained in Japan and here, and even she has made similar ESL mistakes. Some of the tools and dictionaries used for Viet-English are wonky, and depending on when they were educated the English teachers were either unqualified backpackers or some grifter who opened an English tutoring center (oftentimes one and the same). And coming from a language with little overlap with Indo-European languages and roots makes it a very alien experience (and the same in reverse as well).
- elliotec 14d agoI don't know where "here" is, but yes, translation can be hard. That's fine. It doesn't mean we can't get along or have a peaceful world full of diversity in language and culture. We just need to get better at nuance and understanding.
- alephnerd 14d ago> where "here" is California > It doesn't mean we can't get along or have a peaceful world full of diversity in language and culture. We just need to get better at nuance and understanding Wasn't making a judgement about that. I was just pointing out a somewhat common mistake and pattern I've noticed Vietnamese ESLers make. Your reaction seemed very intense and polarizing for what sounded like a funny anecdote of a date gone wrong. My SO had a similar reaction when she confused "common law marriage" and "civil law marriage" years ago.
- neuroticnews25 14d agoDiversity of cuisine, language and lifestyle is great but at the limit peace is a cultural value in itself, you can't always have peace with a culture that doesn't believe you're as deserving of freedom and wellbeing as they are, and there have been plenty of those over history.
- 14d ago
- yongjik 14d ago> Common language, culture, and context makes a more peaceful world. As a South Korean - well, considering that my country once went through an existential war against our mortal enemies, the other Koreans ... Common language and culture doesn't stop hate. Sometimes it just means that your insult will land on your target perfectly as intended.
- itake 14d agoVietnam (and the USA) also famously had civil wars as well :)
- elzbardico 14d agoYeah. Let's make the world a fucking boring place because american white tech bro thinks he is entitled to have sex around the world without even trying to understand the culture of the people they want to fuck.
- carlosjobim 13d agoWhat a sad comment. How would you know if the commenter is American or white or a man at all? Much less what "he" works with. Or if the interaction happened "around the world" or in the commenters home country? Or if any of the involved people spoke English at all? Probably you don't care about any of that, because you are high on your own supply of hatred.
- elzbardico 13d agoYou're just moralizing in another direction. We live in a world of imperfect information, we vote with imperfect information, we marry with imperfect information, we invest with imperfect information, heck, now we even write computer code with probabilistic methods! And you are trying to imply that I am somehow a bad boy for noticing the obvious clues and inferring the scenario? Are we now living in the world of the dictatorship of the literal, where we can't even make social discurse without a school marm appearing to stamp [citation needed]? All that said, this is very typically brazilian, as I infer that you most probably are, due to the fact that nobody uses their real name on HN and thus, much probably your name is paying homage to the famous brazilian music who created Bossa Nova. This petit-burgeouise habit of tone-policing without really adressing the argument is a defining characterist of the brazilian educated elites. Oh! I did it again! I inferred a conclusion from incomplete information. Pardon, mon ami!
- majorbugger 14d agoWhile at that, let's also get rid of all the cultural differences (which can cause problems during such interactions) because it's gonna be more peaceful
- CyberDildonics 13d agoI'm not sure a woman not wanting to hang out with you has anything to do with LLMs affecting the way people write.