Being so immersed in the exchange-student world right now, I have to constantly be aware that almost no one else is and many people don’t really care what we’ve learned (and there’s no reason they should). In most cases, if someone is kind enough to ask, “How’s Chloe doing?” I respond with, “Good. She’s having fun.” and leave it up to the other person to pursue the question. If I don’t get a further response, I know he is being polite and has asked the equivalent of “Hi, how ya doing,” so I am polite back and then we talk about the weather.
That said, I’m always a little disappointed and surprised at the people who can’t comprehend, and so dismiss, anything outside their immediate frames of reference. The Spanish eat dinner at 10:00 PM? That’s just too late and doesn’t make any sense. In the Scottish Highlands people stop their cars in the middle of the street to run into a shop because the middle of the street is all there is. Well, that’s just stupid. Maybe, but the rest of the world has managed to survive without our mealtime or traffic advice for quite some time.
Likewise, when fretting about potential language difficulties, it’s so common to hear, “Yeah, but you don’t have to worry because they all speak English, right?” The Spaniards, Brazilians, or Japanese may have learned English, but that’s a far cry from speaking it or understanding it spoken. We expect them to speak our language, in their country, but feel no obligation to speak theirs. And many Americans truly believe that Americans have no accent, which is an ethnocentric implication that the rest of the world’s speech is measured against that of native speakers of American English. You’ll be quickly disabused of that notion the first time you hear a British person parroting your American accent while telling you to park your car in the garage rather than the yard.
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