amarielah:

machigaeru:

I started Hebrew, which is why I’ve been dead on this blog, but I don’t think I can ever properly convey to you guys the sheer cultural whiplash of spending years learning Japanese from Japanese teachers and then trying to learn Hebrew from an Israeli

• Japanese: you walk into class already apologizing for being alive
  Hebrew: you walk into class, the teacher insults you and you are expected to insult her back
• Japanese: conjugates every single verb based on degree of intended politeness, nevermind keigo and honorifics
  Hebrew: Someone asked my teacher how to say “excuse me” and she laughed for several seconds before saying we shouldn’t worry about remembering that since we’ll never need to say it
• Japanese: if you get one stroke wrong the entire kanji is incomprehensible
  Hebrew: cursive? script? fuck it do whatever you want, you don’t even have to write the vowels out unless you feel like it
• Japanese: the closest thing there is to ‘bastard’ is an excessively direct ‘you’ pronoun
  Hebrew: ‘bitch’ translates directly

Fun fact: Israel has possibly the lowest power-distance metric of any culture in the world, while Japan has one of the highest. I didn’t realize that the CTO of my company was the CTO until somebody else told me, because everybody called him by his first name and engaged in mutual shit-talking/playful insults with him.

In Japan, even calling your boss by the wrong honorific is liable to get you in trouble.

And apparently there’s some sciencey cooperative venture going on between Israel and Japan in an official diplomatic capacity. I want to be a fly on the wall when Japanese and Israeli scientists work together.