In a class on intercultural exchange we learned that most people who move abroad (semi-)permanently go through a U-shaped curve. Starting high with a Honeymoon phase, followed by a crisis/culture shock after about 2-3 months. And then a recovery and acceptance/adjustment/mastery/adaptation/whateveryouwannacallit phase. Many people also have this process repeating in waves.

Interestingly enough, people who go through the U curve once and come out the other side usually also experience the same curve when eventually moving back to their “original” country.

When looking around where I should stay in Japan, I found many reports that APA is distributing WW2 Japanese warcrime denial pamphlets and booklets in their rooms, some written by the founder himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re unhappy about documentaries tackling those topics and block them as a result.

There are also some other fun controversies about them if you look around the internet. For the record, I chose not to stay with them as a result of learning about the WW2 stuff, but all the rest didn’t really make me wanna stay there either.

We use, if needed, apostrophes or upticks. 2’999,95. No danger of messing up between . and , that way.

Also let’s just wait until that person learns that not every country separates into blocks of 3 and how many options of mixing and matching there are in use.

I’ve seen variations of a snarky “I never had this problem on Linux” one-liner comment so many times that I have to resist the urge to write “I never had this problem on Windows” every time I see a Linux user asking for help.

As someone who’s learned Japanese a bunch: once you’re very familiar with the symbols, you don’t look at every little line to determine what character it is, just the general shape. The characters are built by combining a discrete and smaller set of “drawings” (called radicals). So the space of possible characters is limited to those combinations. On top of that, not every legal combination actually exists. You won’t suddenly run into 鬱, but with a different radical in the bottom left, unless you’re playing a trivia game of “spot the mistake” (which can even be difficult for native speakers, just in the same way it can be difficult for native English speakers to spell some words they’d have no trouble reading.)

I would wager some misplaced lines wouldn’t hurt readabiliity much in the same way we, in English aren’t usually struggling to read a sentence even if some of the letters are swapped/missing or a “the” is duplicated, etc. I’m sure you’ve seen examples of that before in English (or your own native language if it isn’t English).

Of course in some instances, even a tiny difference can change the meaning of a sentence entirely. This is also true both in English and logographic languages. Luckily our brains do a lot of subconscious work here too and figure out where special attention is and isn’t needed by using context and knowledge about the writing system.

(Small caveat: of course, especially in languages, there are always exceptions to every rule. And also the brain can be tricked, intentionally or not, in a variety of ways.)

I love you.

The “5 seconds after they started moving” is relevant. If we assume this takes place on Earth (i.e. on the surface of a sphere with a set pair of north/south poles), the angle between the two vectors changes depending on their current position.

If it’s not on the equator, it’s also slightly up to interpretation if “Due East” means they’ll turn to stay on the same latitude, always adjusting to stay moving east forever or if they’ll do a great circle. In the former case, the north moving one will eventually get stuck at the north-pole too instead of continuing their circle around the globe. Most likely not within 5 seconds though, unless the place they started was within 25 feet of the north-pole.

To actually do the math we’ll need to know (or somehow deduce) where “the place where everything about them began” is though.

At least yours were taught by actual people.

My girlfriend showed me recently that one of her profs made an AI clone of himself (voice and visual) and distributed prerecorded lessons that way. Who knows if he’s even writing the script for it. Probably not.

I wonder if they’re talking in absolute values (not smart in this case, obviously). All those listed countries are rather small, so the same % immigrants would just be a lower number…