I just guess Emma would find this video interesting...

[Pierobon]

You know, she grew up in the UK, and now she's in the US for quite some time, so I guess it would interest her.

 

 

But you guys are also invited to talk about it!

Unless she has a Smurf account on this forum, I doubt she would see it anyways. 

[The Dude]

I didn't watch the entire video (skipped around), but as an American I get kinda tired of these "certain things confuse Americans," "Americans don't understand stuff" kind of things. I know Jeremy on Top Gear likes to take shots at Americans and it's said in jest, as a joke, but after while, it just gets tiring being someone's punching bag. I tend to stumble across a lot of videos on YT of English people talking about Americans and what they don't get or talking about their visit to the US and the weird things that we do differently.

 

As for the video, it's mislabeled. It's a difference in culture. We're not confused by numbers. We just say things differently from those in the UK. Just like we may say baby stroller while those in the UK might say pram. It doesn't mean that the English language confuses us, but our cultures speak differently.

 

For instance, in the video when they talk about how to say a year and that in Britain they say two thousand and one but here we say two thousand one. Growing up, I was taught that putting and in there was incorrect English. Our teacher told us that when you write 2001 the word and is nowhere to be found so don't say it. Even so, some will say twenty fourteen, some will say two thousand and fourteen and yet others call it two thousand fourteen.

 

The people in the video say they get confused by numbers like fifty six hundred instead of five thousand six hundred. But I'm an American and I say fifty six hundred. I think what a lot of people from the UK and Europe don't quite realize is how large the US is. And it's full of people that are culturally different. Unlike enormous countries like Russia or Canada that are sparsely populated. We speak differently from each other here. There is no set US way to speak. Someone in New England may say soft drink. While someone in the Midwest (Chicago area) might say pop. And someone from the South will call it a coke even if they are talking about Dr. Pepper or some other soft drink. In the South, every soft drink is a coke.

 

As an anecdotal reference to the size of our country, in high school, one of my classmates had hosted a German exchange student. On the day before they were to go back to Germany, the family asked the student what they'd like to do before they went back. The student said he wanted to visit the Grand Canyon. The host family said that wasn't possible as it was about a thousand miles away. The German student had no refernce for that because it's possible for them to visit another country on a day trip. They didn't believe that the student was dumb or didn't understand distances, they knew that it was just the difference in having grown up in another place.