Why do we care about what other people think of us?

[december_solstice]

For a minute, I was really interested in psych tests. Especially those you can do effortlessly online.

Anywho, some time ago I asked my husband, parents, and a few close friends to select (in the test) 5 of my good qualities and 5 of my bad ones. Even though this happened forever ago, I'm still thinking about the results.

Two things really stood out for me:

1. Everyone thinks differently about me Everyone. Everyone perceives me differently.
2. Even though there were several negative qualities that were listed, there was only ONE that bothered me. A friend, selected "irresponsible."

I couldn't believe it, to be honest. I didn't think she thought of me as irresponsible. In fact, I believed she thought the exact opposite -- that I was very responsible. IN FACT, what is so odd, is the fact that I think she's irresponsible and makes somewhat poor choices. If I were in her shoes, I would do things very differently.

You're probably thinking "irresponsibility" is nothing.

This bothers me a lot. I don't know why. I mean, of course I'm not perfect, but I feel like I make decent decisions and all of my risks are calculated. I think I have my priorities in check. Question is, why does this bother me so much? What if I am irresponsible? Is that really that bad? So what if someone else thinks I make bad choices. So what if people think I'm a bum (LOL), does it really matter. I mean, I kind of am a bum, yall.


Anywho, here is a song by Ice Cube. Lol. Are you hype now? I am.

I'm curious -- what would you consider the biggest insult? For me, I'd feel pretty shitty if someone called me unintelligent or irresponsible. What about you?

Comments

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

If someone gets focused on one thing - "you don't clean enough" - that maybe they do better than you, then they don't notice everything else about you and view it in comparision... Like my wife doesn't go on Skype all the time and keep people updated with things, so her cousin sees that as "irresponsibiliy" whereas she herself sees it as "being antisocial".

As for why we care what people think, it's natural pack-animal behaviour LOL. We're raised by society to care. No longer can we just go out and start our own business and make money no matter how weirdly we act, just because we're the only blacksmith in town...

I'm not sure what the biggest insult to me would be. I get upset if someone acts like I'm a kid and don't know anything, since I grew up being treated that way by all the adults in America. What I really don't like is when I explain something (ex. facts - like "how to learn a language") and someone just completely dismisses it and doesn't even pretend to think about it and try to change their opinion. That feels like an insult, as if what I'm spending my time on is meaningless to everyone except for myself. I don't like it when people bring up bad stuff I've done or mistakes I've made, but I think big insults are really just about stuff I've personally struggled with a lot.

For example, I didn't grow up speaking another language, I only really began learning one (previous attempts were too weak or didn't get very far) at age 18. Online I see a LOT of people insulting "monolinguals", even saying stuff like "I can't even imagine what it's like to only speak one language, that's so awful/you have such a narrow mindset/you're so stupid if you are". So then I get pretty mad. No, I'm not someone who was born in Europe or another place where you learn three languages in school, no one in my family (except for my great-grandpa) speaks another language, I didn't live in an immigrant neighbourhood, I didn't get foreign-language movies or videogames, you couldn't even buy foreign-language books at the bookstore. There were language lessons online when I was a kid but no one told me about them and I didn't just happen to find any on my own. I didn't get an allowance or money from chores so I couldn't buy or didn't think to buy textbooks. I didn't know anyone else who was learning another language, or if they were they didn't talk about it.

When you live in a place where no one speaks another language and no one even thinks that a foreign language is important, you just think it's completely normal (or even impossible) to not know one, you don't usually get a crazy drive to learn one. AND there are many many more people out there who only know one language - the average Japanese person only knows Japanese, go to the countryside in most countries and their knowledge of English (and likely all foreign languages) will have dropped drastically... You can't help how or when or where you were born, or what body you have, and you can't help what kind of education or family you were brought up with... Oh and people say stuff like that I'm "obsessed" or "gifted" with languages which really irks me because no, I am shit at languages, I just study like mad and then constantly read about new methods of learning so I can make myself learn faster and better. And I don't like ALL languages, only very certain ones, some of which I just have a passing interest in but might read about or study a little anyway...

/runs off to the grocery store

[outerspace-bae.livejournal.com]

I've tried learning a language (many not hard enough LOL) but it just doesn't work for me. I do love the idea of being bilingual/multilingual ect. My boss could speak...em...6-7 languages? Fluently. She was something else. People in the US definitely don't value it. They're anti anything that isn't English. "This is 'merica! So you speak 'merican!" Hah, what a bunch of douche bags LOL

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

Esperanto is super fast/easy to learn, as in if you don't have good lessons you will take longer BUT it's still so simple that you don't actually need good lessons, you'll figure it out fast enough even without them. So, after one year or even much less - if you work at it or if your lessons are particularly awesome - you can be fluent in Esperanto.

Learning is just a skill that's equal parts how YOU study/practise and parts how THEY teach you. Unfortunately 99% of all lessons today for every language are absolute shit, and I could rant forever about this, but basically they do stuff like say that Japanese and Indonesian have adjectives - which they don't. When you claim something exists that doesn't, it complicates things and makes you misunderstand the entire language, so you're not seeing things in any like a native is and that also means you don't use the language in the same way.

Then they do things like write "this means puppy, library, policeman" instead of "this means little dog, book-collection-place, law-regulator-man". Or they write "this means leaf, branch, trunk, tree..." instead of "this means tree-stuff". Surprise, when you don't do stuff like literally break up the words then you take a lot longer to learn and the whole language seems a lot scarier. When you don't actually give the real definition, the usage of words takes a lot longer to learn.

For example, people are surprised that the colour "blue" in Japanese also means "green". Well it's obvious if you look at the word's history - it actually means "sea-colour, ocean-colour". Likewise, yellow is "amber-colour" (ranging from yellow to brown to red, so the dictionary will say yellow but then it might get used for brown-red hair). But when you simply learn it as "blue, yellow" then of course you get confused later.

Then there's in what order they teach you. If you learn words according to frequency, as in make or find a list of the most frequent words (ex. for Indonesian I gathered about a million words by copy-pasting various fanfics into a text file, then threw it into a word frequency generator), and learn the most frequent words first, surprise, you learn faster because learning a language is like creating a net and filling in the "gaps" of what you know. What you learn first NEEDS to be the most useful stuff so that you can start getting the gist of things ASAP. You can learn everything else through context.

Finally the main problem is the (modern) utter lack of attention on things like etymology and pronunciation. For example, let's take a word like "samukunakatta" in japanese - it's translated as "wasn't cold". In modern textbooks, you're supposed to learn this as if it's a single verb form. Actually, this is three separate verbs stuck together.

"samuki (old form, the modern is "samui" because the k was lost but the k is retained in other forms of the same verb) means "is cold". Long story short, its form when reliant on another verb that follows for its exact time meaning (tense) etc is "samuku".

"nai - non-existing" (verb), turns into "naku" (reliant form). The final u is removed for ease of pronunciation, something that occurs often in Japanese with the syllable "ku", to then make simply "nak".

"atta" is the past-tense form of "aru - exists" (verb).

So we're literally saying "samuku nak atta" = the non-existance of cold existed = "it wasn't cold".

Furthermore, this "atta" is really a combination of "ari - an existance" and "ta - already happened; past tense". Now, "arita" turns into "atta" due to basic pronunciation rules.

[ringlat.livejournal.com]

(*Forgot to note up there: "nai" used to be "naki" in the old days too, it lost its k just like samuki/samui. That's why it's "naku".)

The r in japanese is not actually an r, it's a "d" that is pronounced locationally in the mouth, in-between their normal d (pronounced by flicking the tongue against the back of the upper teeth) and the place where you say the j of "jewel, jade". However, the t sound is pronounced in almost exactly the same way and location as the d sound, it's just that one uses "the voice" (the vocal chords vibrate/move - meaning you can't whisper the sound) and the other doesn't. Same with s and z, p and b.

So, T = D. The Japanese R is too close to those in both how you make it and where it is in the mouth, so it's Ṱ/Ḓ (nonsense letters I made up). Now, Japanese doesn't like having two syllables that are right next to each other in a single word and that start with the same sound, so it normally either deletes something from the first syllable, or changes it to another sound. Thus "aṱita (arita)", having two sounds too close to T right next to each other, becomes "atta" - the RI/ṰI is removed and instead a little pause is inserted and we spell it as if it has two normal T's.

Now you've just learnt a bunch of stuff about Japanese that is not going to exist in any modern textbook, including for why some verbs are "irregular" ; D Anyway this is the kind of thing that can be taught in a single lesson but since modern books are so shitty, they still haven't taught you this even by the end of your third textbook, and they just act like everything is irregular or like there are no rules for something when there really are.

When you're learning a language like Esperanto that you CAN learn really fast even without this kind of good help, it doesn't matter all that much if you have good lessons or not. But it's easy to see how these kinds of problems are the real reason behind why people never end up learning anything, or why it takes someone 5 years to get any good at Japanese.