I always wonder what they mean by "ritual", it always seems to be a throwaway word for modern or ancient cultures that just have different beliefs or traditions. But it's rarely used when talking about the author's (or anthropologist's) own culture.
Sorry for the clickbaity title, I'm in a rural area and don't receive post, I recently got a package sent to me internationally via DHL (you can imagine the occasion). There are customs duties to pay, but DHL's payment page is broken, confirmed by a friend spending 1 hour on the phone with them. Then a couple of days later I get a WhatsApp message (we don't have mobile service here, but we do have internet) saying I should transfer the import tax payment to an account and they sent me a photograph of the account on a piece of paper. Questions: is this normal, should I pay, and how can this the level of security that DHL, probably the biggest postal company in the world, employs?
In terms of ease of learning, extralinguistic factors are generally more indicative. For example, availability of intensive courses, quality of those courses, availability of materials/cultural output, willingness of speakers to interact with learners (either for reasons of inability of communication otherwise or for reasons of ideology), similarity of culture or cultural concepts between the learner's culture and the one of the language they are learning. All of these have as much or more impact on ease of learning than any index of grammatical complexity. (Edit: Basque has excellent courses run through AEK and Basque speakers are usually very motivated to talk Basque, so if you want to learn a language I would highly recommend it, oh and there is a mass of culture like music and films).
Linguist here. In one sense yes, but there are many other senses, also maybe in one language the cases are regular but in the other they aren't. There is complexity from phonetics/phonology to pragmatics, and all languages distribute it differently. Basque cases for example are very regular, like Turkish or Hungarian, but Russian or Icelandic cases are less regular. So it's actually easier to pick up Basque at least the morphology than it is to pick up Russian or Icelandic.
I don't know to what extent that is true, I'm not saying it's not, but I also wonder. Having been in a lot of places where the traffic is unpredictable, I've noticed that people pay a lot more attention to the road and their surroundings and in general drive more defensively than on places where there is an assumption that everyone is following the same rules. This is just anecdotal of course, but I think it would be interesting to look into. I certainly feel a lot safer as a pedestrian in Mexico than in the US for example, even though the traffic is more unpredictable. But again it might be an illusion.
The article is kind of hysterical, but has some interesting information in. I always wondered what to do with plastic bags and bottles and stuff in places where there is no rubbish collection. Burning seems popular, but despite looking up DIY home incineration it seems like not much effort is being put into this.
I also wondered why there aren't deposits on plastic bottles like there are on glass bottles. In the end it should probably be up to the companies who produce them, like Coca Cola to deal with them, but there probably needs to be an incentive to return them.
I lived in Tromsø and drove to Sweden and Finland a fair few times... there is zero customs enforcement. At least for cars, for lorries they're probably tracked in some other way.
In England they definitely do for parking purposes. Like, you get two hours free parking and after you have to pay. And they track it via licence plate readers.
Ok, that makes it more difficult. For /ü/ make the sound "ooh" and then push your lips forward. For the /r/ try saying /tülkiye/ with /l/ and then note where your tongue hits the roof of your mouth. Say it again and move your tongue back a bit. That's the best I can do with a written description, you could also try listening to the song "Ölürüm Türkiyem" on YouTube ... Yaren Doğan has a fun version.
In Turkish the /ü/ is like a French /u/ in the word "tu" so super round and front. The /r/ is flapped like in Spanish, and for the rest you just pronounce it how it looks. There are three syllables: tür-ki-ye. Turkish orthography is very good.
Turkish Airlines has a publicity campaign going on where on every flight there is a video of foreigners trying to pronounce Türkiye. I think most of them are actors, but all of them pronounce it differently (and not like Turkish speakers would), mostly it comes out like /töğkiyey/. In any case it doesn't matter too much, write Türkiye say Turkey, English is pretty flexible with spelling.
It's hard to have a serious accident when you're going under 10 miles an hour. And I also disagree that blunt knives are more dangerous. One might give their child a plastic knife which is totally blunt, but not a super sharp machete.
One of the things I love in Mexico is the "topes", they're like sleeping policemen, but lot bigger, and you basically have to slow down unless you want to mess up your suspension. I think some of them are implemented by local communities as well, which is pretty cool.
And vote too... I think the only election that can't be voted for is English people resident in Ireland for the president (for obvious reasons... there is no equivalent vote in England).