Forum members who'd never opened a book in their whole lives

[CosmoLady]

Where in real life can I use knowledge provided by novels?

Reading novels helps to improve comprehension and writing ability.

These are critical life skills, and also reflect general intelligence.

Reading frequently also helps with learning grammar and vocabulary,
often more quickly, naturally and intuitively than direct lessons.

And reading high-quality novels will cultivate intuition, discernment and understanding of the human condition,

which is intangible, priceless, and possibly life-saving.

One begins to notice and recognise archetypes, patterns and themes that repeat themselves.

Does art reflect life, or does life reflect art? High-quality literature is the study of life itself.

[Tooting Carmen]

Europeans appear "more intelligent and knowledgable" about the outside world than Americans because in Europe you can travel 5 for hours by car and pass through 3 countries with different languages not because they had to read useless novels like Romeo and Juliet in high school. When you are in USA you can travel for days by car and still be in the same country, this is impossible in Europe, that is why Europeans have more of an international outlook than Americans.

That is certainly part of the explanation. But I think there is also a philosophical and cultural difference between Americans and mainland Europeans (the British are somewhere in between both): Americans tend to pay more attention to the pragmatic and the material, while Europeans tend to pay more attention to the esoteric and the philosophical.

[Universe]

Reading novels helps to improve comprehension and writing ability. These are critical life skills, and also reflect general intelligence.

Reading frequently also helps with learning grammar and vocabulary,
often more quickly, naturally and intuitively than direct lessons.

And reading high-quality novels will cultivate intuition, discernment and understanding of the human condition,

which is intangible, priceless, and possibly life-saving.

One begins to notice and recognise archetypes, patterns and themes that repeat themselves.

Does art reflect life, or does life reflect art? High-quality literature is the study of life itself.

Reading non-fiction improve those things too while providing more useful real life knowledge. Novels are entertainment like movies.

[Tooting Carmen]

translate this

https://www.bild.de/sport/fussball/h...8050.bild.html

Playing just for the fun of it does have its place, but these proposals sounds quite extreme and bizarre.

[#Oda#]

That is certainly part of the explanation. But I think there is also a philosophical and cultural difference between Americans and mainland Europeans (the British are somewhere in between both): Americans tend to pay more attention to the pragmatic and the material, while Europeans tend to pay more attention to the esoteric and the philosophical.

It's because we don't feel like being the center of the world like many Americans do.
And because we have to care more for the world around us than they surrounded by oceans and protected by the best equipped military of the world.

[Tooting Carmen]

It's because we don't feel like being the center of the world like many Americans do.
And because we have to care more for the world around us than they surrounded by oceans and protected by the best equipped military of the world.

True.

[Mingle]

I agree, novels are worthless. They are for entertainment not for education. If someone finds them cool, they should read them in their free time. They might as well make us watch movies. There are many more usueful non-fiction books than stuff like Romeo and Juliet or whatever. I want to a "good high school" and 80-90% of students in my class did not read those "mandatory novels", we just read the shortened versions secretly, in some cases I did not even read those. We did not miss anything important.

I actually like reading topics that interest me (psychology and other science based books), novels are waste of time. I like books that provide me with information that I can use in real life. When I was a high schooler I thought reading was something bad and boring because I thought that reading = reading novels due to education sytem.

I always saw specifically stuff like Romeo and Juliet as being taught cause it's part of English cultural heritage. But they're also used as tools for practicing essay writing.

Also, they do make us watch movies sometimes.

Technically, you could argue lots of mandatory subjects as being worthless if you aren't going to make a career out of it, such as advanced mathematics and sciences. Like why do they need to teach me about cells and arterioles instead of philosophy or accounting if I'm not interested in working in the medical field? I could learn it all later if need be.

[Mingle]

That is certainly part of the explanation. But I think there is also a philosophical and cultural difference between Americans and mainland Europeans (the British are somewhere in between both): Americans tend to pay more attention to the pragmatic and the material, while Europeans tend to pay more attention to the esoteric and the philosophical.

Having more knowledge on the outside world just has to do with relevancy. America is the most important and culturally dominant country in the world by far so it's gonna be most well known globally. There's not many countries we border to have to know about them to any meaningful degree like the case with most European countries. Americans aren't gonna know much about European countries cause there's no need to, similar to how Swedes, Poles, etc. don't have any need to have any knowledge about Tajikistan, Burundi, etc.

[Tooting Carmen]

Having more knowledge on the outside world just has to do with relevancy. America is the most important and culturally dominant country in the world by far so it's gonna be most well known globally. There's not many countries we border to have to know about them to any meaningful degree like the case with most European countries. Americans aren't gonna know much about European countries cause there's no need to, similar to how Swedes, Poles, etc. don't have any need to have any knowledge about Tajikistan, Burundi, etc.

Granted. Nevertheless, (1) I would still reckon that at least a slightly higher percentage of Swedes and Poles compared to Americans could locate Tajikistan or Burundi on the map, name their capitals etc. and (2) when you consider the extremely diverse origins of Americans (even solely looking at White Americans), they often don't know a great deal about their ancestral countries.

[Celestia]

Ok but what if you opened a kindle?

Asking for a friend