Reading Foreign Faces
As Westerners, when we look at people from the East, we often struggle to identify different nationalities. It’s more challenging for us to identify Taiwanese features and distinguish them from say Japanese or Vietnamese features. It’s even difficult at times to distinguish the differences in facial subtleties of people of the same nationality.
But have you ever wondered if we are equally as challenging to read to Easterners?
We actually are more challenging for them to differentiate for them, too!
Does this surprise you?
If you want the answers to this test given on the video, click over to the YouTube video and the answers are in the text below the video.
Do you find this interesting?
It’s much like meeting a foreigner. You assume “they” have an accent, right? When in reality you BOTH have an accent to each other.
Thanks to Paul for sharing this!
…but reading the expressions of others isn’t as hard. Understanding some of the cultural reasons behind some of them is tricky for me. For example, if I were to take a sip of an alcoholic beverage in the presence of anyone my elder and failed to turn around and sip out of their view out of respect, I could expect to look up from my drink and stare right into the glaring eyes, pursed lips, and rather tense bodies of everyone at a table in Korea. I would have offended pretty much everyone. Failing to understand customs can get a person into hot water!
That girl at the end who says that Asians can tell who’s Korean, Japanese, etc is totally wrong. If you don’t have cultural cues from clothing and makeup, just their natural faces, there is not much of a way to distinguish, the same way you can’t tell a white American from a white Canadian just by looking. There are much bigger differences within groups than between them. Give that girl a bunch of pictures of non-famous East Asians’ faces and ask her to divide them by nationality, and I promise she’ll be surprised at its difficulty.
I have this problem with my own family. I’m mostly white and grew up mostly in white middle class cities, but I have a lot of native american relatives. I have two nephews the same age. One of them was adopted so they aren’t biological siblings. I can’t for the life of me tell them apart. I feel so bad too. I study their school pictures, look for unique mannerisms, things like that. But when I see only one of them and they aren’t wearing something I’ve seen before I can’t tell at all. They both kind of look like this kid without the mohawk http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/SFUKXOahyzciZSfnV.Q3CQ–/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3NfbGVnbztmaT1maWxsO2g9Mzc3O3B4b2ZmPTUwO3B5b2ZmPTA7cT03NTt3PTY3MA–/http://media.zenfs.com/en-us/homerun/complex.com/cee8d0ab3afc6b99e231afa9a90685b8