My issue with organic stores in Germany is that they offer the exact same stuff you can get in a regular supermarket, just smaller, less flavorful and more expensive. My pet theory is that a lot of people here just don't really enjoy food, so when they have kids or simply some extra disposable income, their idea of "eating better" would be to have the same bland plate of spaghetti, just with organic pasta and organic sauce.
I know people who behave as if they had to spend money as quickly as possible every time they receive a paycheck. Their wish lists are just "ideas to spend money".
To me it's more telling of German mentality: if I follow all the rules, then the outcome has to be correct. Tell them it's not the case, and they won't know what to do now.
This doesn't happen in my speech, I certainly pronounce both <a>'s as [a] in "niania". [ɛ] is different, it certainly becomes [e] after palatalized consonants. I agree that people cannot tell the difference intuitively, though.
Every time there is a longer period of cold weather in the warm season I see populists on social media ironically asking where is this climate change supposed to be. People have a short context window. It doesn't help that our efforts to combat climate change consist in large part of petty consumer regulations that are annoying to individuals while not achieving much.
First of all, listen to your body and calm down. I've been to an otolaryngologist recently because of recurrent dizzy spells. The test results were all good, and the diagnosis was simple: I've been unconsciously flexing my muscles and clenching my teeth. The advice was to build consciousness to this and actively relax.
I've then realized that with that flexed state a kind of mental flex follows. I got used to this kind of stressed-out context switching that put my brain in a racing thought state. Noticing when this happens and consciously stopping and then actively releasing the bodily pressure has been an important step in regaining control of my brain.
I've realized that I kind of conditioned myself to this kind of dopamine seeking that persisted regardless of the medium I'd consume. I'm >30 and therefore skipped the TikTok phase, but even as I got rid of the Instagram habit (it helps that the algorithm is really poor at predicting content I'd want to watch) I would find myself doing the same kind of short bursts of short-term attention and immediate switch even with text-based media such as Reddit or Wikipedia.
Try to capture your mental state when you are in this "mindless consumption" mode and learn to identify it. Develop a habit to notice when this happens and then stop and ask yourself what are you chasing, after all. Try to pause at the content you're currently reading and read it till the end once you calm down.
It also helps to find books that keep your brain active while being engaging to you. I've had a lifelong passion for linguistics and I found myself digging into language philosophy, for example. This is the kind of literature that keeps me engaged, but forces me to slow down as well to think and properly process what I've read. Your mileage may vary; we are different people and definitely you have different interests than me.
While I'm not a fantasy fan, I'd be a little wary of picking up fantasy books. My observations tell that the most successful ones read like action movies or first-person video games, and fast-paced action is something you want to steer away from for the purpose of this exercise. Pick up something that challenges you a bit, but is still comprehensible with the context you have right now.
Twain is of course being satirical here, but I can tell that many people have an overly strict approach towards language learning. They expect rigid rules and get annoyed when the language does not adhere to them, yet they do not realize that these rules came after the language and they are most often a tool to teach and analyze it. What language instruction is supposed to achieve is providing one with a foundational understanding of language, just enough that immersion learning becomes possible. Since human language is a mix of logical thinking and fuzzy pattern matching, there is no other way to learn it completely than by pattern matching itself.
I'm a Polish speaker and have met some Polish learners in my life. Often I have no better advice than "you choose the conjugation patern based on how does the word feel to you".
Having lived here for a bit over 5 years, I can say that Germans too often like to speak from the moral high ground. There are things that are sacred and indisputable, like opposition to nuclear energy. Try to complain about a strike in public services causing you inconvenience, and you will invariably get lectured on solidarity. I've seen people interrupting speakers at public events to "provide important context" that was nothing more than self-flattery from the interrupting person. I do believe in this country and think that it has way more upsides than downsides, but the people here could sure use a bit of humility.
Reading lists really give people the idea that reading is some mechanical task that has to be done in fixed time and has a potential to be optimized. This is how speed reading classes were invented.
Moving to a Western country and having a Polish name with a fixed diminutive effectively means having two different names, each one used with different crowds. Work colleagues know me by my full name, everyone else by the diminutive. A friend of mine who is seeking naturalization pondered simply assuming the diminutive as her official name for simplicity, because it's how she introduces herself to everyone.
In my home country people have the diminutives encoded and they know to switch when we are in an informal context. Full names are rarely used in speech if one's name has a diminutive - if you don't know someone it's more likely that you will only use Mr/Mrs + their last name, otherwise you address them with a diminutive. A curious intermediate form of address is found in superiors at work and people who met as older adults - Mr/Mrs + first name, which then can be a diminutive or not depending on personal preference.
I've been working on a project for the former Polish state telco and the codebase was mostly Java EE as written in the mid-00's. Since you cannot really be productive in Java without an IDE, standard English conventions for naming have been pushed onto the devs from early on - a getter must start with `get` or `is` if the return type is boolean, class names have to contain standardized postfixes corresponding to the design pattern used, such as `AbstractFactoryBean` etc. But since few people spoke English back then, they ended up with awful hybrid names such as `getCennikSluchawkiKeySet` or `OfertaManagerPrzylaczeProxy`.
100+ years is still pretty recent. The immediate predecessor to English as a world language was French. Matter of fact, my country has only dropped French translations from its passport with the most recent design update a decade ago or so.
Latin would have been used pre-Renaissance. Our grandparents might have still had to learn it as a part of an educated person's toolkit, but it was long not intended for communication anymore back then.
At the same time, foreign companies are only allowed to operate in China through partnerships with Chinese companies. Why should we play fair if they don't?
> I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers
You don't even have to go this deep. Each and every friend of mine who's German of mixed heritage (Black, Asian) has struggled with people who can't imagine a German not being white. As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, you have to be a tourist.
I've identified a specific style of speech in my native language that is used by less educated people trying to sound formal. It involves as many official or legalese-sounding terms a layman could come across, intertwined with "formal" grammatical constructs, many of which are incorrect, but which managed to spread virally. It's the kind of tone that you will find in a private message sent by a stranger who got angry with you on social media and tries to intimidate you with vague legal steps or something that you find in a complaint to customer service. Similar stuff going on with religion - the religious texts are all translated to sound vaguely archaic, but still comprehensible (the most common Bible translation here dates to the 1960s). This gives a feel that there's something serious going on.
At the same time, a great deal of pedestrian crossings is not marked for cars at all, and only at most hinted towards for pedestrians. Sometimes there is a small pedestrian crossing sign painted on the road facing the sidewalk, sometimes there's just a slight decline in the curbside on both sides. I guess that this is some legal loophole to give cars priority, since legally they have to stop if someone wants to cross the street on a marked crossing with no traffic lights.
It's not customary, it's a widely recognized problem that a significant portion of the population starts the day with liquor. Maybe for blue collar workers it's more normalized, but if a white collar has such habit then they will try to cover it up.
Or maybe it's because every other company has an app, just like every company had a hotline at some point. Even if few people will use it, you have to have all the communication channels covered.
Having graduated from a Polish university and having done a semester in Germany I can say that at least the people who attended university in Germany had an idea what are they interested in and what do they want to do after graduating, while me and all my peers in Poland just went to college because of societal pressure and kept jumping the hurdles put up by academic staff who knew no better and were taught that academia is just about about bootlicking your way up while pretending to teach.
I grew up in Poland in the 00's, so long after the transformation and I would already know actual pizza ("actual" meaning that my favorite pizza was ground meat with garlic sauce and caraway in a pizzeria that was likely one of the first ones that opened in my hometown), but I do recall recipes that were remnants of the older time. My mom got a "pizza" recipe from an elderly friend, and this "pizza" was basically a sauerkraut quiche with cheese and ketchup on top. I think that everyone there has a family recipe that was named after some foreign food, but is in fact only vaguely similar to the original - for example one friend of mine brought "Saigon rolls" to a party, and these were just crepes stuffed with mushroom filling typical to our cuisine.
Regarding the rosary, I would rather guess Warsaw being the seat of government attracts lots of fringe types who come there to protest. I've last been living there in 2019 and I remember that the political climate was already heating up back then, with religious groups protesting in various places spontaneously - groups with loudspeakers at entrances to public transit, trucks driving around blasting anti-gay slogans all day, random marches of people in knight gowns carrying that certain picture of Jesus in a lavish crown that's a dogwhistle among certain ultra-religious groups - I've seen all of that, and still I would consider Warsaw to be overwhelmingly liberal in comaprison to the rest of the country.
One exception is the city's football team of course - but football in this country is synonymous with ultra-nationalism.
I already find it disturbing enough that I'm getting targeted by all those run-of-the-mill AI entrpreneurs matching the ML part of my job title and auto-generating my work email in order to try to sell me their barely strung together ChatGPT wrappers because they were "impressed by my AI experience" (I have none). If I got physical advertisement material using my likeness and delivered in person, I would straight up call the police on whoever brought me that.
I remember seeing that some people in the corporate world put a capital J instead of a dot in some sentences. I first brushed this off as some artificial corporate level of politeness that's not too forward (the hook of a J does indeed look like a smiling face). Turns out that 4xA, the value of J in ASCII, is occupied by a smiley face in Wingdings. I still struggle to get it how did the Outlook email client know which characters to convert in the UI.
Maybe this approach would have made sense if the area were an established hub in whatever craft those immigrants are specializing in, but in case of Portugal what I can see is a country with (formerly?) cheap CoL trying to attract immigrants who keep working remotely, paying taxes elsewhere and contributing whatever little consumption tax they pay into the local economy. There's no established competitive IT industry or academia. This isn't how you build high-tech economy, it's how you become a suburban wasteland for rich people.
Some countries including my home country Poland impose a ban on political agitation on the election day. It means that no political content may be published on that day, but whatever has been published before that is allowed to stay. This is an old law which predates the Internet, so anything from social media posts to hanging up election posters is liable to be prosecuted and the authorities frequently do so. It's less drastic than in Pakistan, more drastic than in the West, but it certainly does cause a chilling effect on people when they know they may lose a few thousands if they get caught.
I find it to be coincidental to the general interest in mental health and the resulting wave of self-diagnoses. It has its positive sides - even I did eventually seek psychological help after going through all the resources available online - but I've also met people in real life who collected personality disorders like badges of honor. There's one couple I know who only formed a strong bond after she's convinced him that his family is toxic and he should go no contact with them, just as she did long time before that.