014 Bridging the Culture Gap with Dr. Batja Mesquita and Simon Ager

Dr. Batja Mesquita is a social psychologist, an affective scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology. She is the author of "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions." In this episode's first interview, KMO and Batja discuss: 03:10 – Batja's background and story 04:26 – What's WEIRD about Western countries 05:46 – US vs Netherlands: cultural differences 10:30 – Translating emotions between cultures 32:48 – Batja's take on the KMO's interview with Rich Firth-Godbehere 36:08 – The nature-culture dichotomy Our second guest, Simon Ager, is the founder, developer, and proprietor of Omniglot.com, an online encyclopedia of languages and writing systems. In this episode's second interview, KMO and Simon discuss: 47:40 - Learning Japanese writing 51:58 – Change in language learning methodologies 52:33 – Writing scripts on Omniglot 53:16 – Tolkien's invented languages 54:32 - Sonja Lang's Toki Pona 55:48 – Emojis 57:20 – Making random changes to the Klingon grammar official 58:18 – Languages, pidgins, creoles, and dialects 59:18 - Mastering accents as adult learners 1:01:37 – Watching foreign media and acquiring fake accents 1:06:23 – Omniglot's unusual pedigree as a one-man linguistic orchestra Host and Guests: KMO: @Kayemmo | en.padverb.com/kmo Dr. Batja Mesquita: @batjamesquita | www.batjamesquita.com | Wikipedia Simon Ager omniglot.com/aboutme.htm | @Omniglossia