Re: English for Asian readers

[Len Olszewski <saslpo -at- UNX -dot- SAS -dot- COM>]

Stewart Lindsay provides insight on Asian communication:

[...]

> And as for refering to "you", my experience was that direct
> "confrontation" is generally avoided. I often saw people seemingly talking
> into thin air on the trains in Japan; on closer inspection, they were
> conversing with the person next to them, but rarely ever faced them.

[...]

I remember watching a television series on PBS a few years back on "The
Brain"; wonderful series, very well-conceived and nicely executed -
technical but paced quite well. Anyway, there was one show in the series
about how humans interpretted human speech.

There was a method of identifying which portion of the brain was active
when humans listened to a variety of things. They knew, for example,
which portion of the typical American's brain was active when listening
to birds sing or to a babbling brook. They knew what portion of the
brain was active when a typical American listened to somebody speaking.

They replicated these experiments in Japan, and for whatever the reason
(cultural, environmental, you name it), when the typical Japanese
listened to somebody speaking, the portion of the brain that was active
was the same portion of the typical American brain which was active when
the American was listening to "natural" sounds - the birds chirping, the
brook babbling, and so on.

The idea here was that the Japanese culture treated human communication
differently the US culture to such an extent that the physical process
by which individuals from each country interpretted speech was quite
different.

To the extent that written text is a representation of human speech (and
indeed the physical mechanism of Japanese writing is a good deal
different than it is here) it's not that surprising that different
expectations and rules apply.

Anyway, this falls into the "for what it's worth" category. Draw your
own conclusions. I'm going to draw my own beer a bit later on after I
break for the holidays. And this afternoon, I'll probably draw a blank.

|Len Olszewski, Technical Writer |   "To err is human, but it feels   |
|saslpo -at- unx -dot- sas -dot- com|Cary, NC, USA|    divine." - Mae West             |
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| Opinions this ludicrous are mine. Reasonable opinions will cost you.|