Foreigners and their way of thinking Hi, everybody! My name is Yulia, I’m from Russia. I learned English at school and at the university, but then I had a very long break. Recently I’ve decided to improve my English and took part at language marathon named Language Heroes. It is project of polyglots, placed in the most famous russian social network vk.com. We must study foreign language for 12 weeks and every week we have any tasks. This week I have to write texts and send them to native speakers for check out. I think it’s not difficult, but I’m not good at grammar and vocabulary at all, that’s why I’m sure there will be a lot of mistakes in my texts. Please, write me about it. What do you think about differences of foreigners’ mentality? Every country has it’s own features, rules of politeness and norms of behaving. Sometimes you do or say something normal to you, but people from other countries consider it strange or rude. Of course, you should learn about mentality of people you are going to chat, but it’s really difficult to take account everything and clearly understand the foreigners’ way of thinking. For example I’m interested in Japan and Japan culture, I’ve read articles about Japanese’s psychology, watched video blogs of foreigners’ living in Japan and so on, but Russian and Japanese people are so different, that I can’t behave properly with my acquaintances from Japan. They say people should be tolerant and try to understand each other, ask questions and not be afraid of talking. But I know that the most of Japanese people prefer not to say what they really think and they always smile. Foreigners suppose that Russian people have bad manners, because we smile only when we are really happy or something is funny. And we don’t use ‘thank you’ or ‘please’ as much as Englishmen, for example. Of course, we behave so, because we accustomed to this, it’s normal in our society. We don’t want to look rude and impolite. I think Russians are direct and outgoing. We often express our real thoughts and feelings. Some people consider it as bad manners and try not to meet Russians, but some people think it’s quite good to hear more truth than lie or just polite words without any feelings. What do you think about foreigners’ mentality and Russian people you've met?