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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Ah, I forget hacker news has an American biased perspective, where ramen just means cheap crap you get in packets, not the fancy stuff we have in Asia.

And of course, ramen in Japanese just means "Chinese noodles", plenty of people in china eat them everyday in china and they are just fine. Imagine if some Chinese poster said "Yeah, careful with using that white bread as a currency unit. It sure is cheap, but it's the kind of food that will mess up your health long-term".

Isn't that weird o first glance?

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I'm Australian.

We have packet noodles too, we just call them "noodles".

Paul Graham has referred to ramen a lot in the past, I guess it's a west-coast-exposure-to-Japan thing.

No, you're encountering the bias that $.15 ramen causes. And the HN bias towards pedantry (not always unfair).

15-cent ramen is crap everywhere that you can discuss a $50 steak dinner and $3/dozen eggs. The egg in your ramen, by those units, would have cost 25 cents alone, and is clearly excluded.

The ramen I had was 40 RMB, which...given that 1 RMB is .16 USD, is around 40 ramen units. They would never call ramen as fangbian mian here.

If you only ate wonderbread for all 2k calories of the day, it would mess up your health -- just as eating $0.125 packets of ramen would mess up your health if that was all you ate.

Not all ramen is $.125 a pack though, most of it in the world is actually not! It is just stupid and shallow that people think "ramen" would just mean the crap that they sell in American grocery stores.

Why not just use the real name of what you are talking about? "Instant noodles," "instant ramen," or "fangbian mian" would be much more accurate and much less bizarre.

From wikipedia:

> In North America, Japanese instant noodles were imported starting in the 1970s bearing the name "ramen", causing the term "ramen" to be often used in North America to refer to instant noodles.

So there you go. I'm sure it will disappear in time, as awareness of asian cuisine develops.

And this is hackernews, where all the readers must be from North America? I doubt the poster is even in San Francisco, where there are lots of decent ramen restaraunts to be found. On that same wiki page, there is nary a pic to be found of instant noodles.

Well, yes, it is an english speaking website, so I imagine the colloquial usage of 'ramen' probably refers to whatever the colloquial US usage of 'ramen' is.

Not sure why you're making such a big deal about it. Misuse of loan words is common in many languages, not least Japanese. Why, not 3 hours ago I was talking to someone who is about to rent a マンション (mansion) in Tokyo. Needless to say it is not any kind of mansion an english speaker would recognise, and I didn't see any pictures of same on the japanese wikipedia page. [1]

It happens. It will probably happen less now the world's so interconnected. Not worth four comments in a row!

[1] For the uninitiated, in japan a "mansion" basically refers to an apartment in a building built to a certain quality.

At our place we don't bother eating instant noodles unless they're Shin Cup or Mi goreng.

You can actually eke out a decent meal if you're willing to add additional nutritious items (eggs, greens, etc.) to otherwise bad instant noodles.

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