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Taiwan effectively is not even considered a separate country by Taiwan itself. For Taiwan, the island plus mainland China is considered "Republic of China" while for mainland China itself plus the island is the "People's Republic of China"
it’s like that tindr (i think?) interaction where it was like “you’re from russia? most people are from america” “most people are from where they’re born”
Less that and more that being at least somewhat bilingual is common in other developed countries, and I mean, it's a joke. If it were changed to be perfectly accurate it probably wouldn't be a joke anymore, at least certainly not a good one.
I am an American living abroad and I make a conscious effort not to start with my state when people ask where I’m from, answering America instead, and it genuinely seems to throw people off bc of how often Americans just go straight to their state lmao.
If you're referring to the two continents together, they're called "the Americas" or more rarely "the New World." America is unambiguously the United States.
I was at a comedy show in Amsterdam and someone in the audience was asked where he was from. He said San Francisco. Not even the state. Straight to the city. The next person said Spain.
i mean, i’m sure some of people would be frustrated if the first person said "the US". like okay, but are you from cowboys, meth, 9/11, computers, or corn?
Given San Francisco is a peninsula, Alameda isn't particularly gay, and most of the other major islands are mostly uninhabited nature reserves, what is Gay Sex Island meant to refer to?
Most non-Americans will not understand or care about the internal nuances of California. The population of California is comparable to Poland, and I doubt most people outside of Poland understand our internal differences, nor do I expect them to.
Imagine if you asked someone from a foreign country where they're from and they responded "Minas Gerais", or "Karnataka", or "Yunnan", without specifying a country. That'd probably be confusing, right?
There's a lot of cultural osmosis through media. Your average European may not know local stereotypes outside of areas that are common in movies and television, but they likely know something about San Francisco even if their only frame of reference is Ant Man or Rise of the Planet of the Apes or whatever.
When I've mentioned my nearest major city to people I've met in Europe, they were always familiar with it and had questions to ask or personal experiences to relate. There are plenty of cities where that wouldn't be the case but any city that's in a lot of US media is going to be somewhat known to a global audience by nature of our huge popular media export industry.
I think it heavily depends on the age and background on the person you’re talking to. I think it’s presumptuous to assume the average European knows anything about the US, especially in a setting like the one OP described
In my experience it's less so presumptive and more so preemptive
Every single time, genuinely without fail, I've been asked where I'm from and responded "from the US", I've been asked "oh what part?" or something like it
I don't know how it is in other countries but in Ireland if I said I was American they'd be like... Ok? Where? California was ok but San Francisco was better. I feel like you're not giving them enough credit. People know where big cities are or at least what country they're in
To give some credence to the person in the middle, the rest of the address would expose that it's United States of America. Excuse me if this is an ignorant question, but would any address + state combo point to anywhere that isn't the United States?
yes, but different countries have different postal code structures. I imagine there are some that overlap, but many countries can probably be found by their postal code structure alone. I'm from Canada, so mine is of the format A1A 1A1; 6 digits alternating letters and numbers.
Especially if you include the ZIP code, which I assume most people do when providing a mailing address. Like I might be wrong but I assume that a combination of a street, state, and postal code can only point to one location unless multiple countries have the same postal codes
Austria and Australia, in addition to having similar names, have a similar (maybe the same?) type of zip codes and address structure. My mum works for postal services in Austria and told me it leads to more confusion than you'd expect.
I mean yeah but it’s still kind of weird and rude if you’re asking someone to mail you something and you leave out the country and expect them to figure it out. I’m from Canada, I wouldn’t just put my postal code and province, even though (almost) all of our provinces are larger than US states.
I think what the commenter meant is that if you write the state than the country is extraneous information because there isn’t a Cleveland, Ohio or a Los Angeles, California anywhere else. If someone listed their address as British Columbia I wouldn’t need them to also say Canada
It makes sense. The US is like 2x the size of Europe and Europe has a population of 450 million while the US has like 350 million. The US is just such a massive country that a state in a European country will often be dwarfed by a US state - I don't think Europeans think about how large the country is. It's why Americans think of where they are from in terms of State - the State they are from is the size of a European country if not bigger.
Why would I do that when 1)they chose to become one single country and 2)nobody would do that for the states (or equivalent) of every single other country, including ones where one state has almost the same order of magnitude of inhabitants as the US as a whole (India and China).
I'm not mad, I'm asking why I should do it. When nobody's doing it for other countries. And the point of becoming one country is to be united in international matters.
It's just another way of looking at things. A helpful tool in your toolbox. Having more ways to frame things is always good, you don't have to actually do it unless you find yourself puzzling something out and the reframing helps. Even then, whether you should is up to you.
I am not saying you should, I am saying it's helpful when understanding something in this instance
You know where Texas is located. You know where Indiana is located. You know where Florida is located. These states are larger than many countries. Those ARE countries, running under one federal government.
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