Every time when I am at the supermarket ready to pay, I get strange looks as I repeat what the cashier just said but then go digit by digit like seven-eight instead of seventy-eight. I see the cashier thinking: “are you the idiot or do you think I am the idiot?”

I’m afraid it’s neither or if anything, a bit of the first – it’s just that I’m from The Netherlands – and English logic when is comes to numbers is very different from Dutch. Seventy-eight in Dutch would have been “eight-and-seventy” – you see why I prefer to call it out digit by digit: simply to avoid messing up.

Another area where I always struggle is with spelling:  the English “a” sounds like the Dutch “e”; the English “e” sounds like the Dutch “i”; and the English “i” sort of sounds like the Dutch “a” (but the followed by a “j”).

SPARK OF THE DAY

Next time when someone seems slow on the uptake or has a very different way of doing things, be mindful it may not be their level of intelligence, but rather their cultural upbringing.

As this amazing video by Derek Sivers shows, sometimes “weird” might just simply be “different”:

Celebrate diversity!