In terms of history, geography, politics, current events: I’m a generally ignorant western / global north / anglophone type of person.
I feel like a real jackass sometimes when I meet someone from outside the narrow context I know anything at all about. And I don’t even know if their home country is an island, landlocked, what kind of climate it has, what the basic government is, what are the common languages or religions, what military conflicts it has been in, or anything else.
Trying to remediate that is very overwhelming because there is so much to know. You could spend your life just learning about the narrowest of subjects.
-
What do most regular people from around the world know about? Obviously it will be different in the details but if I wanted to be of average knowledge, what would it entail?
-
I find the very first part of of the learning curve on a new topic is the most difficult. The information has nothing to hang on in my brain so even if I understand it at the time it kind of washes away. Having even a very loose, vague understanding of european history obtained via pop culture makes it easier to retain new information. Like if something happened during the Reformation, I know when that was, some context about technology and conflicts, what came before and after. But when I read something was during a certain Chinese dynasty, I have no such frame. How to overcome this?
-
On the one hand I don’t want to be paralyzed by perfectionism, but on the other hand I don’t want to be learning too much that is flagrantly incorrect. It’s hard to judge when you are totally naive. On the third hand, it’s good to know about common perceptions of things even if they are wrong, because they are important to how people discuss and integrate. For current events equally to history.
-
How do you learn geography? I got a shower curtain that’s a world map. So it would be easy to look at regularly. It has made a very modest improvement. I still can’t identify most countries.
The key is that you are interested. Good job!
I don’t know anything about Chinese Dynasties, either, but I know that for me, simple timelines work and complicated ones do not – not until I know some basics – so this question sparked me to look for more information and here’s the stuff that immediately looked readable to me:
Timeline from here:
But Dynasties were not covering ALL of China, borders and regions change, so I’d also need something like this timeline page that links to maps for different times, like these: Eastern Jin Dynasty around 400 AD with the declining Northern Wei Dynasty and states of the era of the Sixteen Kingdoms: Later Qin, Later Yan and Southern Yan.
Compared to 600 years later with the Song Dynasty, the Liao Dynasty (Khitan Empire), and the Tangut Empire of Western Xia:
That’s WAAAYY too much to take in at once, but if you see a movie or play a game that involves some chunk of time or particular person, you can quick-reference where the interesting item fits. Learning any story – even fictional – helps me fill in details. Certain games, like “Plague, Inc.” might help with general geography (though that particular game omits lots of countries).