Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 178 of the Listening Time Podcast.
I hope you're all doing fantastic, and you might be able to hear that I'm just a little bit under the weather.
I'm just a tiny bit sick.
Really, I don't feel that bad, but my throat is a little bit sore, and so you'll maybe hear that in this episode.
And probably in the next couple episodes as well, because I record these episodes back to back.
When we say that you do something back to back, we're saying that you do it consecutively without any interruption.
So hopefully I don't sound too bad.
And in today's episode, we're going to talk about the question, are Americans friendly?
And let me just warn you right now. that there won't be a very clear answer here.
The answer will be a little bit, let's say nuanced, meaning it's not just super clear on the surface and that's it.
So I'll give my opinions about this, and I think that this is an interesting topic for all of you, probably because you're probably somewhat interested in American culture, because you're learning English and you probably have your own ideas about whether or not Americans are friendly.
So that's what we'll talk about today, and I want to remind you that if you want my pronunciation training, if you want my help to actually pronounce English words and sentences more naturally, then I recommend that you use the training found in my membership.
You can become a Listening Time super member or any of the higher tiers, the higher levels, and you'll get my pronunciation training every month.
So you have that.
And then, of course, the advanced episodes are available for Listening Time family members too.
And you can also listen to my US Conversations podcast if you're ready to start practicing, with two people talking together me and another native English speaker.
This is great practice for your listening and this will help you reach the next step, the next level in your English learning journey.
So the links for both of those are down below.
Alright, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Okay, let's talk about this question about whether or not Americans are friendly.
And when I use the word Americans, I'm referring to people from the United States.
I've talked about this topic before.
I know that many people would consider themselves Americans who are not from the US, and that's perfectly fine.
But I don't have another word to use to describe people from the U.S.
We don't say U.S.ians or United Statesians, okay?
The proper term for this is Americans.
So that's what I'm referring to, okay?
So are Americans friendly?
Well...
I have had a lot of experience as a teacher, talking to people from all around the world over 80 different countries.
So I have been able to talk about this topic with a number of people from different backgrounds, from different countries.
And I would usually hear a couple different opinions that sometimes contradicted each other.
And it usually depended on where the student was from.
So some people would tell me that Americans are super friendly or unkind, overly friendly, like it's almost annoying for them, and they always look happy and they're always smiling and, like i said, that could even be strange for some foreigners and i heard that opinion sometimes.
And i also heard the opinion that Americans aren't very friendly and that Americans are somewhat cold and formal, more so than people from a lot of other countries.
And I also just heard this opinion recently that Americans are like peaches, whereas other people from certain countries are like coconuts.
A peach is that fruit that is soft on the outside.
It even feels like it has like little tiny hairs almost.
But then on the inside, there's this hard core.
So this opinion is that Americans appear friendly on the outside, but when you try to go deeper they're not as easy to develop a very strong friendship with.
Versus people that are coconuts are people that have a hard exterior, like they don't look friendly.
They don't smile at you if you are someone they don't know and they probably don't make small talk with you.
But if you really crack into their shell, then it's soft and sweet on the inside.
So I heard that opinion recently and I don't necessarily agree 100% with that.
I think it really depends on the person and it depends on where you're from.
So, with the opinions that I just mentioned, like people who normally say or who normally tell me, that Americans seem super friendly, overly friendly.
These people often come from places like Eastern Europe, East Asia, Russia.
Places like that.
And in those places it might not be very common for people to smile all the time and make small talk with people.
And talk with people on the airplane that you're flying on people you're sitting next to.
That might not be very common versus in the US, it's a little more common.
And then some people that would tell me that Americans aren't very friendly and that we are more cold and formal.
These people often come from Latin America or maybe very warm countries.
So that's just a general kind of overview, but that's the trend that I have seen throughout my time as a teacher.
And both of those groups have some criticism of Americans' friendliness, because even the people who say that Americans are super friendly and happy and smiley, they will often say that it seems fake, kind of like the peach illustration, that it looks really good on the outside but inside it's harder, right?
So both of those groups tend to have some criticism of the friendliness of Americans.
So what are my opinions?
What do I think about this?
Well, my thoughts are gonna be a little scattered.
When I say scattered, I'm saying that they're all over the place.
They're not in a very neat order, let's say.
They're gonna be disorganized because, like I mentioned earlier, this is kind of a hard question to answer.
So there are a few things to consider.
First of all, we need to recognize that we tend to generalize when talking about countries or people from a certain country.
And I know that you know this, but it's worth repeating.
We tend to generalize, but there's always some truth to these generalizations, right?
It's probably not the entire truth.
But there's a reason why we have a certain stereotype or why we generalize in a certain way about certain people.
There's some truth usually to that.
And another thing to consider is that it depends on where you are in the U.S., of course.
There are some places here that would be considered friendlier places and there are some places that would be considered colder places.
So a great example of this is New York City.
People have this stereotype of New York City as being very unfriendly and cold and not a friendly place.
When I visited New York City, I got that impression as well.
I can't say that I really disagree with that.
But that's a great example of how a certain part of the US might seem really unfriendly, and if you only travel there, then you're going to leave with the impression that Americans aren't friendly, right.
But in reality people in other cities, other states might tend to be friendlier on average, which I think is the case for most places outside of New York City.
Most places are probably friendlier in the U.S. than New York City.
So it also depends on where you are in the country.
And it also depends on your definition of friendly.
What does friendly mean for you?
For some people, friendly refers more to the exterior, what's on the surface like.
This person is always smiling at people and talking to strangers and whatever, complimenting people in public on their dress or how cute their baby is or whatever.
For some people, that's friendly.
For other people, their definition of friendly is more uh something that's deeper like they don't care at all about the surface it's um if you can really develop deep relationships easily with those people right or maybe not even just easily but can you develop deep relationships if you make the effort So that might also make a difference in whether or not people consider Americans friendly.
And one other really important point that I want you to really retain when you retain something, this means that you keep it with you.
In this case, you keep it in your mind.
Most people don't talk about this when they talk about this topic.
And that is that when you develop an opinion about how friendly people are from a certain country, usually That opinion is based on your experience going to that country and interacting with those people.
Not always, but that's often the case.
And if that's the case, you're making the judgment from a foreigner's perspective.
So think of it this way.
If you travel to the U.S. and let's say you're from Brazil.
I have tons of people that listen to me from Brazil, so that's a good example.
If you're from Brazil and you live in the US, your perception of how friendly Americans are will really be affected by the fact that you're a foreigner.
Because in some countries, foreigners are extremely interesting or rare.
Like you don't see them often and people are really curious about those foreigners.
Like, for example, when I go to Mexico, especially to the places that are a little bit outside the touristic areas, people are pretty interested in me.
They look at me.
They are curious to talk to me.
They haven't seen tons and tons of foreigners like me in their town, for example, in their small city or whatever.
And so people have a natural interest in foreigners.
So I might have that perception that people in Mexico are super friendly, but it's because I'm a foreigner and they want to talk to me.
I've been in situations where it's me and then a Mexican person.
And when we go into a social setting, everyone is interested in me, not the other Mexican person, because I'm a foreigner.
So in the U.S., this is kind of the opposite.
If you go to big cities in the US where most people go when they travel as a tourist to the US, you are going to go to places where the people are very accustomed to seeing foreigners.
Let's just face it.
There are many, many more foreigners in big cities in the US than in a lot of other places around the world.
By the way, when we say, let's face it, we're saying, let's accept this truth.
OK, so people aren't going to be as thrilled.
Thrilled means super excited and happy about something.
People won't necessarily be as thrilled to talk to you just because you're a foreigner and that's interesting for them.
But that is the case for a lot of other people that travel to other countries where it's not common to see a lot of foreigners.
So you might not feel that same warmth towards foreigners.
It's not because Americans don't like foreigners.
It's more because we're very accustomed to foreigners in our cities.
I'm talking about places like LA and New York and Miami and places that you probably think about visiting right.
And the other part of this point is that if you go and live in the US and you're from Brazil, for example, and you are going to stay there for a long time, you are probably going to make other Brazilian friends there.
This happens all the time to almost everyone.
So this is a very common situation.
And you're going to compare your relationships with those Brazilians to your relationships with Americans.
And it's not a fair comparison, because the Americans around you are in their home country this is just their normal routine versus the brazilians around you are also foreigners living in a foreign country and who are probably very interested in making friends because they probably feel alone there.
So you probably notice that it's extremely easy to make friends with other Brazilians in the US, because those Brazilians are in the same boat as you.
When you're in the same boat, this means that you're in the same situation.
I also experienced this in Mexico when I would go to these meetup groups where there were other Americans living there.
It was very easy to talk to these Americans and they were super friendly and they wanted to make friends with me.
And that's not necessarily the case when I'm in the US.
That was just the case because we were all Americans living in a foreign country and we were all in that situation and wanted to meet other people in that situation, to make friends with them.
So you get what I'm saying.
If you go to the US and you compare your relationships with other foreigners who are living there with your relationships with Americans, it's not a fair comparison because of course, the foreigners are going to be desperate for friendships.
They want to have that familiarity and meet people from their own country and have that support group.
So that really affects people's idea of how friendly the locals are versus other foreigners that they've made friends with when they live in the US, for example.
I hope you get that point because that's an extremely important point that people overlook.
And in general, what do I think about just the average American lifestyle? living in the US?
Well, if I compare us to people from all of the other countries where I've had students from, I would say that Americans are kind of average, maybe when it comes to friendliness.
And I say this because in some aspects Americans seem really friendly and in other aspects they don't.
So, for example, Americans are very polite in general.
In public with strangers.
Americans tend to be very polite and people often like this, and they might even associate this with friendliness, especially if strangers are asking you How are you?
How was your day when you're at the grocery store or the bank or whatever?
For some people, that seems like genuine friendliness.
And I think oftentimes it is.
It's not that everyone is faking this just because they have to do this or else they'll get fired.
No, trust me, you can go to many, many places here where the people working there are not friendly and they don't ask you these questions.
However, there are many, many places where people do treat you really nice and in a friendly way, even when you don't really know them.
So I think that's kind of a form of friendliness.
Some people might say that that's more being polite.
But I think it goes beyond that, because a great example of this is when you fly on an americans to talk to each other if they're sitting next to each other on the plane.
For a lot of you that probably seems crazy, but this is really common in the us.
I've had this happen to me multiple times.
Even when i'm not trying to talk to the person, the person will often force a conversation on me and it's like overly friendly that type of behavior for some people.
So it's not just oh, this person has a job working as a cashier and they have to be friendly.
No, even just strangers on an airplane will often talk to you and ask you about your life and they'll say a lot of things and open up about themselves.
Often when you open up about something, this means that you talk openly about a certain subject, maybe a deep subject or a hard subject, for example.
So there's a lot of friendliness when it comes to people that you don't know, let's say.
And americans are also extremely neighborly.
I've talked about this before.
Americans in general value their, let's say, relationship with their neighbors more so than many other countries, because people here really respect, like space and property.
And so they kind of work together with their neighbors to keep their neighborhood safe and clean and they kind of work together as a team to try to keep all the things in order in that neighborhood.
And at least when I was growing up, it was common to make friends with your neighbors, and your neighbors would often come bring you a cake or cookies when you first moved into that house.
So I think Americans are very neighborly.
So in those respects, Americans are friendly, in my opinion.
However, I will acknowledge that Americans might not be the friendliest people terms of just overall warmth when it comes to talking to people and how quickly they might invite you to go to their house and welcome you into their house, and That's something that's really big in Latin America.
People can invite other people into their house more easily, probably.
There's this phrase that people say sometimes, when they start talking about their house, they'll interrupt their sentence and they'll add Which is also your house, even if they're talking to a complete stranger.
It's like saying, oh, my house is your house.
That's a very friendly thing, which we don't often say here in the US, let's say.
So that does show that Americans are. aren't the warmest people in every aspect.
And Americans tend to be more individualistic.
So that might affect friendliness, let's say.
However, I think that can also be an advantage, because Americans are often even individualistic when it comes to their family.
So they might choose to move away to another state far from their family.
And that means that they will probably make friends more easily with other people because they don't have their family with them.
This is different from, let's say, Latin America, where it's not as common to just leave your family and move far away.
So people might have the tendency of just hanging out with their family more than going and making friends.
So there's two sides to that that individualism can be something that makes Americans friendlier or less friendly, depending on how you look at it.
And I think that in the US we have a lot of resources that can help you make friends, especially these meetup groups, these meetings.
Groups that are centered around a hobby, a sport, an activity, and there are tons of them where you can very easily go and make friends.
Versus in many other countries, this is not common.
These types of artificial groups that are meant to bring people together to make friends.
That's not nearly as common in most other countries.
So that's something that can make it a little bit easier for Americans to make friends.
And if you're a foreigner living in the US and you're interested in meeting up with some local people, I recommend using the website meetupcom because, like I said, there are tons of groups you can join and go make friends, depending on where your interests, your hobbies, etc.
So that's a good thing.
But I think overall, to give a clearer answer to this question, are Americans friendly?
I would just say it depends.
We're somewhere in the middle maybe, when compared to other countries.
That, And I think it depends on where you're from and your definition of friendliness.
But I would say that Americans are kind of friendly.
We're average in that department.
There's my answer.
I talked a lot just to bring this to that conclusion.
Americans are average when it comes to friendliness, in my opinion.
All right.
I hope that this was an interesting episode for you.
And I hope it kind of helps you see things from a different angle maybe and see why you might feel that Americans are friendly or not friendly.
And if this interests you, I highly recommend that you listen to my US Conversations podcast.
Because you'll be able to listen to other Americans talking to me and you can see our interaction together and maybe get a better feel for just the people of the US and our culture, our friendliness, etc.
So the link to sign up is down below.
And, of course, you can sign up for my membership to get my pronunciation training and my listening training and my advanced episodes.
The link is also down below.
All right.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode.
And I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
