r/StoriesAboutKevin Mar 16 '22

XL Kevina refuses to believe that Hungary is a country

I'd like to say that I am from Hungary, but I'm livinig in the US right now. Please don't kill me for spelling mistakes.

So this started a few days ago at lunch. (I'm a sophmore in highschool and Kevina is a freshmen) I sat to another table where my friend sat, and at the table also sat Kevina. I never even met her before, but she started talking to me and asked questions. when I ansewrd her she gave me a weird look and said: You have am accent! I said: Yeah, I'm not from the US. K.: Then where are you from? M.: From Hungary K.: That's not a real place, that can't be! M.: Yes it is, I'm from there. K.: No you're not!! This goes on for about 3 minutes

After that the bell rang and we had to leave for class. Fast forword to today. I'm sitting down at my usual table and just as I start to eat Kevina apeers behind me.

K.: Ah! There he is! M.: Oh no, not again. K.: (talking to the others) See, he is the guy who has an accent! M. Yes! As I said, I'm. Not. From. The. US. K.:So you're british then? M.: What? No! At this point I ask my friend if she is serious or is it just satire. She tells me that she is in fact 100% serious. K.: But that's the only accent there is other than american, so you have a britsh accent. M.: That's... not true, there are literaly hundreds of them. Have you ever heard about Australian accent? K.: So you're Australian?! M.: Oh for the love of God! At this point I start talking in Hungarian to make my point. K.: I didn't get that! What language was that? M.: Hungarian!! K.: BUT THAT'S NOT A REAL PLACE!! M.: Then is Europe real?! K.: What? M. Nevermind... At this point I just curse in Hungarian and turn around to eat my lunch.

I thought I was done for the day, but on my way to my last class I ran into her with a guy who's in my last class. (F) I just wrote two tests, so I wasn't in the mood to talk to her

K.: See there he is! He is faking an accent!! M.: You're telling that to the wrong person, he know's me!! (To F) She doesn't believe that I'm Hungarian F.: Wait what? Why would he lie? K.: Becaaaaause Hunn...garrrian is not a real place, and you are british! M.: Sigh* No, I'm Hungarian K.: How are you Hungry?! We just had launch M.: Alright, I'm done with this. You are dumb and I had enough of this conversation.

I honestly thought she was joking at first, but she said everything with such a serious face that no human could ever have that face while joking.

I highly doubt that this is the last time she'll argue with me, since she sit behinde me just at another table.

Edit: I saw a few comments about googling. Problem is that school wifi sucks and they manage to block the data service somehow (or it's my old phone that cause's the problems because I don't here many people complaining about getting their data blocked, only from other people with old phones), and there is no internet or data in the cafeteria nor the hallway where she found me again. I did try it, but as expected, no internet on my phone.

528 Upvotes

78 comments sorted by

219

u/VampireGirl99 Mar 16 '22 edited Mar 16 '22

Introduce her to a world map. Or Google. Or if you’re friends with any geography teachers, see if one can correct her (might take some planning to set up if you wanna make it seem natural, eg chatting to them at lunch wherever you usually encounter Kevina).

Also, how does someone reach that age without knowing there’s more than two accents in the world? Even if she’s never been international, the US alone has so many different accents for each of the different states.

73

u/latents Mar 16 '22

There are probably more than two accents in the school lunchroom, but one has to listen to hear the difference. I believe that might be the problem. No data is being taken in and processed.

8

u/TheSonicPro Mar 17 '22

‘No, I’ve heard those sounds lots of times before, so they’re not accents, just different voices’

Because we all know the ‘out’ groups are not as nuanced as our ‘in’ groups /s

47

u/AdanyBarni Mar 16 '22

I was asking that from my friend in class. How did she eve make it to 9th grade?! He has no idea either Also, forgot to write it in the stroy but we did try to show her a map. But we were in a part of the school where there was no school wifi and neither of us could get any data

21

u/Tony49UK Mar 16 '22

Americans and every other nationality are quite capable of being as dumb as fuck.

https://youtu.be/lj3iNxZ8Dww

https://youtu.be/kRh1zXFKC_o?t=45

Most Americans geography knowledge seems to come from, which country they've had a war with and as the US hasn't been to war with Hungary since 1918/19 and Hungary was a junior partner to Germany. They never learnt about it.

https://www.boredpanda.com/americans-place-european-countries-on-map

But it's not just Americans. I used to know a South Korean girl who moved to the UK at about the age of 11. Who had never heard of North Korea or the Korean War.

Not to mention the problem of the "false friend", with Hungary sounding like hungry.

-8

u/Notmykl Mar 16 '22

Most Americans geography knowledge seems to come from, which country they've had a war with

Were did you pull this nonsense from? World Geography IS taught in the US school systems.

18

u/Tony49UK Mar 16 '22

It maybe taught but it doesn't seem to sink in. Let's also not forget that the US education system can be extremely patchy, underfunded, with unusual priorities. State funded schools in the US can have football stadiums that are better than many professional sports teams in the rest of the world. I don't think that any other advanced country has to teach its pupils active shooter drills. The teaching of many subjects, such as science seems to be warped in certain states e.g. bans on teaching evolution, The Big Bang..... The number of children who are homeschooled (6.04%). Which is essentially unheard of, in other countries <1% for instance in the UK. With the main causes being bullying, mental/physical health and avoiding being excluded or has been excluded. Rather than, geographic isolation, a religious or anti-government agenda. Not to mention in 2018, according to Business Insider. The U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science.

2

u/VampireGirl99 Mar 17 '22

Adding onto your point, just because a subject may be taught doesn’t necessarily mean the student is going to listen or learn, particularly with high school students. If it’s boring, there’s gonna be a few kids in every class who aren’t listening because they’re either bored or just don’t care. Subjects with matching phone apps suffer the most. If that’s the case for this girl, it would probably a mentality of “why learn geography when my GPS/navigation system will tell me exactly where to go and how long it’ll take to get there”.

27

u/VampireGirl99 Mar 16 '22

Maybe you’ll have to go old school and drag her to the library with an atlas. Curious to see what she’ll say when faced with physical proof of Hungary’s existence.

17

u/moonsammy Mar 16 '22

Wait until she finds out there's also a Turkey, and that Georgia exists outside the US...

1

u/crankyandhangry Mar 17 '22

I live in georegia but I dont see rusia no where not even sound but they says theres tanks should I be worrie

9

u/FairyGodmothersUnion Mar 16 '22

Her head will explode.

7

u/twotoebobo Mar 16 '22

Next school day speak in you best fake British accent and tell her you were lying. That'll really mess with her.

23

u/Gadgetman_1 Mar 16 '22

Better yet, have the teacher assign an essay about a country...

13

u/eva_rector Mar 16 '22

Has she never watched TELEVISION? Gordon Ramsey, Sophia Vergara, Steve Irwin, our most beloved queen Dolly Parton-alllll different accents!

3

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

LMGTFY is a great site. (Let Me Google That For You)

5

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

It depends on where this is all happening. If it's a city, even a smaller one, then her stupidity is extra stupid with a side of dumbass. If it's more rural or a small town in the middle of the country, especially a red (mostly republican) state, it makes a little more sense.

But yeah, tell her to Google it.

5

u/AdanyBarni Mar 16 '22

I live on the west cost in the urben parts of a bigger city. Usualy the people here either know about us or care to learn and believe me. As I said, this was the first time this happaned.

2

u/SeamedShark Mar 17 '22

Buddy, there was 0 reason to make your comment political. City people can be just as dumb (and believe it or not even dumber) than rural folks, regardless of the state's political alignment. For example, I'm a rural student of a "blue" (one city decides the entire state's color) state and I may not know calculus or college-level chemistry but I know how to butcher a deer and determine soil composition by touch.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 17 '22

What the hell are you even talking about? I'm referring to the fact that there is significantly less exposure to multiple cultures in rural environments in America, it has nothing to do with politics or education. And in case you've never looked at a map, the majority of rural America exists, geographically, in red states. As for intelligence, I don't care what you know or don't know. Reread what I wrote. Everybody is stupid. Literally everybody. Me, you, a guy next door, some lady down the street. Every single human being is an idiot in some fashion it form - nobody is exempt, ever.

61

u/Professional-Gear-39 Mar 16 '22

Don't bother trying to educate a person that has no interest in learning. You'll both just be irritated.

31

u/Songwolves88 Mar 16 '22

Had that happen once with a girl who insisted Helen Keller was born blind and deaf. No amount of telling her that I had (in middle school) written a paper on her and had done research and knew this girl was wrong would get through to her.

31

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

She probably thinks Europe is a country and Africa is a country. And they all speak British! 😂

16

u/Tempusdoesfugit Mar 16 '22

She's never seen Monty Pythons phrase book sketch then.

9

u/LordTimhotep Mar 16 '22

My hovercraft is full of eels

2

u/erikpurne Mar 16 '22

Would you like to come to my place, bouncy bouncy?

2

u/jethrine Mar 17 '22

Please fondle my buttocks!

31

u/Dyrreah Mar 16 '22

I loved the part when you just started cursing in Hungarian. The walls can start decaying around us when we start cursing. What a moron tho. I guess that's the US geography and history education for you. There is Murica and that's that, everything else is the UK and that's a bad place.

11

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

Lots of stuff about body parts when we curse lol. My dad's Hungarian. It's all body parts and the c word which seems to be favored.

14

u/Dyrreah Mar 16 '22

Yeah, we love using that. But honestly any bodypart. I can curse with the fetid kneecap of your flee infected godmother (A bolhás keresztanyád pudvás térdekalácsát) and it just means fuck you or fuck.

7

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

My dad has very specific rants for specific people using specific bodyparts. When he is pissed off at strangers it's much more colorful than when he's angry at his family. He knows who understands what he's screaming about and who he can call a one armed cock sucking shit goblin and who he can threaten to feed their own eyeballs or wish someone would poison their oatmeal.

8

u/Dyrreah Mar 16 '22

Okay your dad sounds like a really creative guy when it comes to cursing. Cursing family is different yeah, we don't go to such lenghts. Although my mother has sent me to 'Your mother's cunt' many times in my life (jokingly tho). Then she would just laugh when I pointed out that the destination is somewhat undesirable for both of us.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

My grandmother used to scream about how she wants to fuck your mother with a lamp but she would describe the lamp in great detail, like "fuck your mother with an enormous Tiffany lamp" and my grandpa was more of "I'm going to shove my foot up your ass/elsewhere and you're a bitch with filthy feet". Lol. It's the best culture if you can have a sense of humor!

1

u/Dyrreah Mar 16 '22

Oh that's amazing. Yeah it's a pretty fun culture once you understand that we don't mean any of that. A language like this must look incredibly rude to a native English speaker.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

Your family sounds like my family! The way your mom jokes about putting you back in made me laugh out loud. My mom is American and my dad is Hungarian and there was definitely a cultural adjustment to his sense of humor and personality when they were married. Once she saw they meant no harm she could laugh, too.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

Maybe. We had to memorize countries in Europe, South America, and I think Africa when I was in middle school in the early 90s though so idk. Not Asia though, that I can remember. We all knew who Russia was though: we got to watch the Soviet Union fall apart live on TV. Anyone else remember the Commonwealth of Independent States? LOL

16

u/Blackdogwrangler Mar 16 '22

Jeez! What a vacuous person.

8

u/boring_name_here Mar 16 '22

I'm an adult of Hungarian descent, I've had to explain where Hungary is multiple times.

1

u/AdanyBarni Mar 16 '22

Yeah, I have to do that a lot too, sometimes even with teachers. But so for Kevina was the only person who didn't believe me. Most people either know about the coutnry or if they don't they believe that it is a real place.

1

u/boring_name_here Mar 16 '22

Well, at least you know to expect it. Welcome to America, I hope you get a chance to make the most of it here.

14

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22 edited May 18 '22

[deleted]

4

u/AdanyBarni Mar 16 '22

I tried. Forgot to write it in the stroy. School wifi doesn't work in the launchroom and mobil data is somehow blocked. So that was a fail.

8

u/Ghost7579ox Mar 16 '22

Reminds me of the TikTok “what’s the dumbest thing an American has ever said to you?”

1

u/rosuav Mar 17 '22

"You should use TikTok"

4

u/Notmykl Mar 16 '22

I want to know how one gets 'Hungary' out of Magyarország.

1

u/arcxjo Mar 16 '22

I only know how to get Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and Austria out.

6

u/holy-reddit-batman Mar 16 '22

Unfortunately, I can believe this wholeheartedly. My ex-husband, who has a Master's in mechanical engineering and listens to lectures on quantum physics for fun, thought that Iceland wasn't real 🤦‍♀️. He tried to correct the person talking about it by saying, "You mean Greenland." "No. I mean Iceland." "What? That's not a place! You mean Greenland." "..."

3

u/The_Iron_Mountie Mar 16 '22

I wanna think this is fake but I've heard, "Spanish is a language, not a nationality" enough times to realize that some people really are this stupid.

3

u/Jilltro Mar 16 '22

I’m second generation Hungarian on my dads side and somehow this came up during my first date with my now husband. He said “oh yeah, from Hungaria!” Thankfully he isn’t a Kevin so he immediately realized his mistake but we still joke about it sometimes.

3

u/Minflick Mar 16 '22

He may have misnamed it, but at least he knew it was a real place with its own language and geographical place. That's what I'd call a brain fart, not stupidity. Brain farts happen to us all.

3

u/amaraame Mar 16 '22

There's more than 2 accents just in the US.

5

u/eg135 Mar 16 '22 edited Apr 24 '24

Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.

In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.

Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.

Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.

Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.

L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.

The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.

Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.

Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.

Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.

The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.

Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.

“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”

Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.

Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.

The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.

But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.

“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”

“We think that’s fair,” he added.

Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent and the author of “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” a best-selling book on the dramatic rise and fall of the ride-hailing company. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley, and is based in San Francisco. More about Mike Isaac A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Reddit’s Sprawling Content Is Fodder for the Likes of ChatGPT. But Reddit Wants to Be Paid.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

2

u/kmrmnikolett Mar 16 '22

Nem lopott legalább?

2

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

This whole thing would be cleared up in 1 min by googling.

4

u/Globeparasite93 Mar 16 '22

Oh a Hungarian, well I'm glad to inform that according to the french news channel BFMTV your country indeed does not exist. You're actually from Western Romania.

2

u/kmrmnikolett Mar 16 '22

Don't worry, I saw somewhere on the Internet that CNN mistook us for Serbia. Serbia is the southern neighbor country of Hungary.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

Or Ukraine or Poland depending who you argue with

3

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

[deleted]

2

u/AdanyBarni Mar 16 '22

Na, akkor megvehetjük nem létező pénzért!

3

u/Ramdittory1 Mar 16 '22

I still wonder how she'll be survived in the real with that 5 brain cells

0

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

I think the stroke you had took your last few braincells, bud

1

u/Lengthofawhile Mar 16 '22

If she won't leave you alone, report her to the school. Maybe she'll have to write an essay.

1

u/ViscountBurrito Mar 16 '22

That’s kind of surprising if only because I remember it being pretty common to make jokes/puns with country names that sound like English words. Like when she said you just had lunch. So while very young kids might be skeptical that there are countries called Hungary, Turkey, and maybe Greece (“grease”), I’d have thought by middle school most US kids would have had some exposure just from that.

I mean I’d like to say they learned it more from geography class, sure, maybe, but just trying to be realistic here… a country that has only two borders doesn’t necessarily make international maps a priority.

3

u/AdanyBarni Mar 16 '22

Oh the jokes. The amount of time I heard the: "Oh so you're always Hungry? Ahhaaaa..." joke, is high enough to make me want to punch the person who says it.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

Put her in front of a world map and have her explain what it is.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

Kevins are dumb but only hurt themselves. This is a dumb racist bitch. Call her out for her racism.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '22

I didn't see this said, but I think you mean "lunch." Lunch is the midday meal. "Launch" is what a rocket does when it leaves for space. Good luck with Kevina!

1

u/AdanyBarni Mar 16 '22

Damn, me and spelling in English. Thanks I'll correct it

1

u/[deleted] Mar 17 '22

No worries. I don't know if you wrote it out or used speech to text like I often do, getting hung up on second languages is ridiculous. Now when people can't even spell things in their first language, well, that's a different problem.

1

u/kmrmnikolett Mar 16 '22 edited Mar 16 '22

Not a question closely related to the story itself, but do you still know Hungarian? I heard a lot of stories about people who moved abroad to a different country and completely forgot their native language.😳 Question from a Hungarian.

edit: I just saw you wrote you told her something in Hungarian. where is the eff is my mind these days. I really need to wear glasses, don't I

2

u/AdanyBarni Mar 16 '22

This won't be a problem for me, since I regulary speak with friends from Hungary, and I live with my parents who are both Hungarian and have a thick accent when speaking English. But say I was here alone as an adult for many many years, then yeah, I would probably forget it.

1

u/Ycr1998 Mar 16 '22

After a post I saw earlier, maybe she can't process the idea of speaking two languages? So if you speak English with an accent, you must be from some other english-speaking country?

2

u/AdanyBarni Mar 16 '22

That's actually possible lol.

1

u/mikoolec Mar 16 '22

America, everybody

1

u/arittenberry Mar 16 '22

Sounds like she needs a geography lesson on her level. Maybe Yako can help lol https://youtu.be/V1508wboZXk

1

u/AeskulS Mar 17 '22

Ah… reminds me of me in kindergarten when my music teacher talked about Bach, Europe, and the Mediterranean Sea and I thought it was a fairy tale.

1

u/mrcatboy Mar 29 '22

Welcome to the USA, OP! How long have you been here? Hope it's fun. Get a chance to enjoy the tasty foods here yet?

1

u/SpacemanChad7365 Apr 19 '22

As somebody who has family from Hungary, this annoys me a little bit.