Quote from: jwharrison30 on March 16, 2015, 12:49:47 pm Quote from: HyooMyron on March 16, 2015, 12:12:15 pm That is one concept that almost no Koreans understand: the amount of diversity in the U.S. Even the ones that have lived/studied in the U.S for several years can't seem to grasp it.



why? is the usa just so diverse that the human mind cannot comprehend the massive diversity?



bridge building, computing, super sized hydrodynamics, architecture, etc are all nothing compared to the fact that some people say yall instead of y'all



honestly, think before you press post will you.





I actually agreed with the poster. I am from Canada, and lived in Toronto for a year. The foreign population is 47% there, the most diverse city in the world. There is nothing even remotely close to that in Korea. It could to a weird idea for some Koreans since there is nothing to compare it to here. However, the statement that almost no Korean can understand it is a bit much.



I actually agree with that poster, too. As someone just said, if you grew up in a very homogeneous society it would be hard to understand diversity (just as many of us have a hard time adjusting to such homogeneity here). It's the same with distance. When I moved to Europe I lived with a French guy for a while. We were talking about Russia one day and he said he couldn't believe that country had eleven time zones and I commented that Canada has 6, so while 11 is a lot it's not hard for me to understand. It just blew his mind. Like, how do we watch TV or vote and things like that. It just had never crossed his mind, it wasn't part of his reality (this was before the internet was a big thing).My first year here my Korean co-workers were complaining that they had to visit their hometowns three whole hours away! I told them my university city was 8 hours from my hometown and I went back and forth regularly on weekends over the years. And that was considered 'close'. My roommate's hometown was thousands of kilometers away and he had to fly and needed a connecting flight.Anyway, my point is that if you grew up in one setting it would be hard to wrap your head around another type of setting. The irony is, if you grew up where everything is the same you already have a hard time using your imagination about how others live, so it's even harder to open your mind to different realities to begin with. So for us, we can sort of understand eating the exact same thing three times a day, for example, even if we don't like it. But for Koreans, it's hard to understand that others do things differently at all, so they often try to contextualize it in their own experiences. If they eat rice and kimchi every meal, then we must eat hamburgers and french fries every meal (even as some Koreans realize this isn't true, they still believe that every Westerner basically has the same diet, and thus all of us eat hamburgers and fries regularly).On the flips side, some Westerners have a difficult time accepting that most Koreans really are the same, or rather they strive to do things in the same way. So often certain people attack others for generalizing about Koreans, when in reality Koreans gladly do this to themselves and actually see it as a defining feature to their identity. Saying, "Koreans eat rice and kimchi every day" is not the same as saying, "All Americans eat burgers and fries every day". Sure, you'll find exceptions in the former, but the latter is the exception. So the people who try to defend Korea(ns) by thrusting our Western ideals on their identity are actually the ones who are denying them their most basic quality, and thus are the most anti-Korean people here.TL;DRThe cat was in the stove the whole time.