Cultures and national stereotypes — Культуры и национальные стереотипы
A nation is a group of people who share common history and usually a language and usually, not always live at the same area. Culture can be described as our everyday life: how we communicate, our language, religion, traditions, behavior, way of life — in other words, what we do each day.
People that belong to various nations may differ and they always differ from one another. For example, the Germans are regarded as scientifically-minded and industrious, they’re always considered solid, intelligent, mathematical, extremely nationalistic, arrogant and even aggressive. And, for instance, Jews are believed to be mercenary, industrious, shrewd, loyal to family, religious. There is a big amount of examples we can list about national character of different people.
Proving the difference of the national stereotypes I want to compare Russian and English nations. There are a lot of features that vary. The Russians are industrious, tough, brave, progressive and suspicious.
Speaking about Englishmen I may note that they’re reserved, tradition-loving, courteous, honest, extremely nationalistic and etc. To my mind, they have a specific sense of humor. They say that they can’t understand our jokes and anecdotes not only because of the different meanings of the words, but because of their humor is more delicate.
Looking at these features of the Russians and the Englishmen it is not hard to mark out the differences. The Englishmen are reserved, but the Russians are open-hearted and communicative. The Englishmen are tradition-loving and the Russians, to my mind, don’t keep their traditions in such a degree.
There is a great majority of factors that influence the nations stereotype and its people’s character. People that live in the southern countries have less problems than those who live in the North and because of this they’re more cheerful and artistic. The history also has a great influence on the national character. The people of Asia are revengeful because their forefathers often were at war with others. In Africa many countries were colonies of the Great Britain, Holland, Spain and so on Africans were the slaves and because of this they’re still hard-working and industrious.
The National Character exists. It is not a myth, it’s a reality. But the National Character doesn’t describe the character of every person, it describes the character of people of nation in general. Every person has its own character, but according to the person’s belonging to some nation many traits of character are similar and these features may be explained as the national character.
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