On 9 May, 17:16, solar penguin wrote:
That's what people like you are like. Most people aren't like that.
Most people just want to get somewhere as quickly, cheaply and easily
as possible, and don't want to think about the actual details of
journey at all.

So, if you decided to go on a driving holiday to America, didn't
bother looking up the speed limits, and then received a ticket for
driving at 70mph instead of 55, that would be the US government's
fault?

What about someone who boarded a plane to India without bothering to
check that they needed a Indian visa? Would they be a victim of
outrageous bureaucracy, or an idiot? What about an Indian who did the
same thing the other way round? (and if your answers to these two are
different, why the difference?)

[if I went to Tokyo without checking how the public transport system
worked, and then got hopelessly lost because all the station names
were in Japanese and I'd only written down my stop in phonetic
English, this would mean that I was a raving idiot, not that there was
a problem with the Tokyo metro].

No, it wouldn't mean you were an idiot at all. It mean that that you
were a normal human being, who just didn't happen to know one specific
piece of information about the Tokyo Metro -- a piece of information
that you shouldn't be expected to know in the first place.

You're seriously suggesting that someone who goes to a country which
uses a different alphabet from us (well, 3 different alphabets from
us, technically) without thinking that /might/ present /some kind/ of
comprehension problem and trying to take steps to mitigate it isn't an
idiot?

(After
all, the Shanghai metro has all its station names written in both
English phonetics and Chinese characters. There's no reason why the
Japanese shouldn't be able to manage it too.)

Could you get any more Anglophone-arrogant? Last time I checked, TfL
stations didn't have signs in Katakana...

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org