What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad?
What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad?
I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it's pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that'd be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can't ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning "swimming" made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
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Pronouncing local place names. Lots of scattered areas here with place names that are spelled like other places names (for example we got a town called Egypt, a town called Binghamton, etc.) except that they're all pronounced differently. For example, we have a town called Leicester, named after the actual Leicester, and locals tend to raise an eyebrow when someone asks "how do you get to lester" (that would be the normal way to pronounce it)?
"Who's Lester? Is he the new guy in town?"
"What? No, the town."
"That's Leesester, not Lester."
"I'm sorry, wut?"
I of course just add to the confusion if I'm the one to break the news, as I have a Kiwi accent, which is atypical around here. So it becomes a "what do you know" kind of interaction.
I briefly lived in a place with some very unintuitive place names that I had no idea how to say.
Problem is that unless it's a very large area, there's often not an easy way to look up how local place names are pronounced.
I remember for some of the places, I had taken to searching on YouTube hoping to find local news reports where they said the name out loud lol.
Lmao. It's not quite that long, but there is a river nearish to me with a bizarrely long name. I tried looking it up one night and could only ever find people abbreviating it! So I'll never know how the full name is pronounced lol. Maybe no one else knows either.
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Where I live basically every location is some combination of "French, native American, English, Scandinavian", "pronounced natively or not", and "spelled like it's pronounced or not".
The fun ones are the English pronunciation of the French transliteration of the native word.
Ruairidh: "Rory"
Featherstonehaugh: "Fanshaw"