The language I'm learning is Japanese and I feel I've achieved a fairly decent level. On one hand you have the students who have their stereotypes most people here are aware of but that's not really the issue of this post, the issue is maybe cultural differences with Japanese people. I don't dislike them as much as I do my fellow students, it's just that I feel like I'm constantly bothering them when I make an attempt to speak to them.
I'm not the only one who noticed this, that say on Twitter or some similar place, on Japanese posts people often get a lot of likes, but almost no comments and Japanese forum threads have this thing to them where everyone just responds to the original poster, but almost no one responds to each other and conversations don't arise. It makes me feel hesitant to even comment on the work of artists I like because it feels like I'm bothering them. Sometimes I do and I get quite enthusiastic replies back but the replies back feel so “public relations” that it still makes me feel like I'm bothering them. In one case, an artist who tweets a lot who I felt sometimes said interesting things and thus replied to tended to reply back, always liked the reply back and now I found out randomly blocked me after the last time I commented a few days back. Did I say something wrong in that particular message? Did I always annoy that artist in some way and was this just the drop and was it just Japanese politeness that made it hard to say this before?
I feel like I can't really read these people. Japanese people often talk about “people who can't read the mood” and don't know when they're bothering people. Am I that as a foreigner who doesn't understand Japanese cultural norms? I honestly don't know whether they perceive me as forcing my way in and giving unwanted opinions on things.
The general advice you often get is to just ignore it and interact anyway but I obviously have no intention to bother these people. There's also the strange psychological effect I noticed that bothering people becomes a lot more mentally taxing when you don't know whether you're bothering people. I noticed I have far less issues bothering people when I know I'm bothering them and giving an unwanted opinion but that I feel they deserve to hear it anyway but what's really mentally grating is that I honestly don't know. It just feels very strange to see these comment sections of artists who have so many likes but either no comments at all or comments that come down to nothing more than “written upvotes” that say nothing at all. It makes one feel it's socially frowned upon in Japanese to say what one likes in particular and to “have an interpretation” of the artist's work which may be perceived as intruding or something.
This isn't just places like Twitter but also some Discord servers, for learners or not, I tried to interact with. It just feels like it has this looming atmosphere where no one interacts or gives an opinion out fear of saying something someone doesn't like and I don't know about the Japanese people there but at least personally I'm second guessing everything anyone says whether it isn't one of those famous polite Japanese ways of saying “You're bothering me by saying this, please stop.”
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