Different Countries

Every country tends to accept its own way of life as being normal and to praise or criticize others as they are similar to or different from it. And unfortunately, our picture of the people and the way of life of other countries is often a distorted one. Here is a great argument in favor of traveling abroad and learning foreign languages. It is only by traveling or living in a country and getting to know its inhabitants and their language that one can find out what a country and its people are like. And how different the knowledge one gains this way frequently turns out to be from the second hand information gathered from other sources! How often we find that the foreigners whom we thought to be such different people from ourselves are not very different after all!

Differences between peoples do, of course, exist and, one hopes, will always continue to exist. The world will be a dull place indeed when all the different nationalities behave exactly alike, and some people might say that we are rapidly approaching this state of affairs. With almost the whole of Western Europe belonging to the European Economic Community (EEC) and the increasing standardization this brings about, plus the much greater rapidity and ease of travel, there might seem some truth in this—at least as far as Europe is concerned. However this may be, at least the greater ease of travel today has revealed to more people than ever before that the Englishman or Frenchman or German are not some different animals from themselves.