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Time in different languages and cultures can be tricky to translate.Īs a result of all of these different perceptions of time, the way we speak about time can be more difficult to translate than it would seem at first glance. The slowest were Syria, El Salvador, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico.
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According to his assessment, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Japan, and Italy were the fastest countries. So which countries are the fastest? Researcher Dr Robert Levine compared the pace of life in 31 countries, measuring variables like walking speed, how quickly people work and how accurate the public clocks were. It affects everything from how fast we walk to how predictably we can get from point A to point B. That’s a nifty superpower to have! Life moves faster in some countries than others.Ĭultural differences in the way people perceive time have a tremendous effect on the way people live their lives. So, if you’re bilingual, you may be able to change how you perceive time by changing the language you think in. Meanwhile, the same experiment showed that for bilingual people, their perception of time changed depending on the language the instructions were given in. Bilingual people may perceive time differently. Spanish speakers had difficulty estimating the time, while the Swedish were more accurate. But in the mid-time conditions Bylun outlined, they struggled.īut when the animations showed a container filling up with liquid instead of a line, the reverse was true. There are limits to this: it’s not as if a Swede would think ages had passed if a line grew super long in just three seconds. While Spanish speakers knew that three seconds had passed regardless of how quickly the line grew, Swedish speakers tended to think that more time had passed when the line was longer at the end of it. They were simply asked to estimate how much time had passed for each one. All the animations were 3 seconds long, but the test subjects weren’t told that. The first set showed lines of different lengths growing across the screen.
Numbers in different languages series#
They showed groups of Swedish and Spanish speakers a series of animations. So how does that affect our perception of time? In a study published this year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers designed an experiment to find out. But other languages, like Spanish and Greek, refer to days as “full” instead of “long.” It’s as if time were a container. We say “what a long day” when we’re working overtime, for example. For example, English speakers tend to think of time as distance. Interestingly, the language you speak actually changes how you perceive time. On a practical level, that means they may need to carefully consider past events before making decisions for the future.Īnd of course, if you’re a Time Lord, it’s a big ball of wibbley-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff that you can travel through. In some cultures, particularly Asian cultures and some Native American cultures, it’s a wheel, moving in reoccurring cycles. Monochronic cultures also tend to see time as a “line,” stretching forward into the future and backwards into the past.īut that’s not universal.
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Time in different cultures: Time isn’t always a line. Japanese culture is generally regarded as polychronic, but the culture is also quite fast-paced and punctuality is important). (One caveat: These are just generalizations. Interruptions are regarded as normal instead of undesirable. In polychronic cultures, it’s also more common to do many things at a once. Monochronic cultures see time as a limited resource, something that can be “saved,” “spent” or “wasted.” In a monochronic culture (like the US or the UK), it’s normal to schedule tasks and appointments to start and end at a certain time.īut in a polychronic culture, time is seen as flexible. And that means that appointments and deadlines may be more flexible as well. Social scientists classify cultures are “monochronic” or “polychronic” based on how they view time. Here’s what that means and why it matters. With that in mind, here are 6 useful facts about time in different languages and cultures. And that can lead to confusion, especially when you’re travelling, or when you’re trying to socialize or do business with someone from a culture that treats time differently than your own. Time should be easy to translate, right? Wrong! The passage of time is universal and inevitable, but the way different cultures experience it is not.