As a young man many years ago I happened to be in Seoul, in a shoe store. I was casually asking prices in English and noticed the salesman or owner was getting visibly angry with me. So much so that as I went around the corner of the store I clearly saw that he had begun advancing toward me, with every intention of physically attacking me. I put my hand forward to stop him and as I did, I shouted loudly, again in English, "Stop. Let me outta here!" To which he suddenly hesitated, stepped aside and let me go.
I wondered for years what I might have done to upset the bloke - he was a well built man and I did not want to fight him! It was only after the KAL crash and the coverage it gave the Korean focus on seniority and age that the penny dropped. He thought I was Korean - I do look very Korean (and Japanese and Chinese) - and was clearly offended by my not respecting his age.
At least that is what I would like to think. The alternative is that I was somehow very offensive anyway and I'd like not to think that.
Interesting. In Germany I've always had the opposite issue of my superiors vastly preferring I used "du" for them instead of "sie". I've always had some trouble with that since in Russia you usually try to address senior employees, your teachers and professors formally, although tech companies are as usual a big exception.
Many people were quite unhappy when I kept slipping up and being too formal with them afterwards... :)
Umm... I'm not sure I follow. You were casually asking prices in English and the shopowner jumped to the conclusion that you were trolling him by using English when you were fluent in Korean?
If it was around that time, most Koreans were not good at English, and it's not exactly hard to tell a native English speaker from a Korean who learned "I'm a boy, you are a girl" in middle school.
Sounds like the shopowner was just a jerk and was mad for some random reason.
It was in the early '90s, sometime before South Korea broke out as a dominant economic force. Yes, I'm convinced he thought I was a western educated Korean brat prancing around in his shop and was having none of it. Looking back, I still feel a sense of relief I didn't get beaten up.
It took me a long time to get there, but I eventually did - I agree with every one of things that you listed. Fortunately, I have also learned that there are a whole lot of things that you can do to overcome each of those challenges. It does require a good bit of time to research, understand and apply them - as well as some luck.
I had a slightly better experience. For the thrill of it, I spent hours preparing for a couple of test papers making a number of little cheat sheets in tiny handwriting. At the end of the exercise I found I didn't need the cheat sheets - the stuff had gone right into memory and I did quite well in the tests.
I learned Spanish vocabulary writing words on my hands to cheat off of, but ended up too nervous to look at them during quizzes. Amazing how the desire to do well, fear of getting caught cheating, can turn into a hyper-powered study technique.
I tried using John Wiegley's Ledger, which uses negative numbers. Everything was great about Ledger except for that part - I just couldn't wrap my head around it.
Maybe this is one of those things that's harder to understand if you have an accounting background. As someone without an accounting background, I found it incredibly intuitive: if money moves out of an account, that's a posting with a negative number; if money moves into an account, that's a posting with a positive number; a transaction is a set of postings that together sum to zero, indicating that no money has been created or destroyed out of thin air.
There's no need to learn any confusing "credit" or "debit" jargon, you just need to think about the movement of money (which you had to do already).
I don't think that is the case. I think it would have to take a deeper understanding of double-entry accounting to really appreciate its genius. The key lies in the double entry that is made for each transaction. While each entry is simple, the beauty lies in how it provides the basis for detecting errors even in very large datasets simply by comparing totals - they must balance. In this context negative numbers do not provide any meaningful information at all.
We implemented negative numbers in our ledger API (https://fragment.dev) and don’t use credits and debits at all. A bunch of engineers who didn’t know double-entry found it a lot easier to pick up. I think the key is to update the accounting equation to:
(A)ssets - (L)iabilities = (I)ncome - (E)xpense
So if you have more (+100) Assets, then to balance it out, you either need to have:
+100 Liabilities (100 A - 100 L = 0) → You took out a loan and increased your liabilities
-100 Assets (100 A - 100 A = 0) → You sold an asset for what it was worth
+100 Income (100 A = 100 I) → You provided a service and earned income
-100 Expense (100 A = 0 I - -100 E) → You got a refund for a previous expense
I think that’s much more intuitive. You can think always think in terms of more or less Assets, Liabilities, Income or Expenses, then use the Accounting equation to check your reasoning.
I have always lamented the loss of the tail. Every time my dog, though almost entirely asleep, wags its tail to acknowledge my presence, I always say to myself "Now, THAT is efficiency."
I'm not a furry, but I'm open to the possibility of getting that back!
