Americans take a lot of flack for not knowing much about other countries, but do other countries not know as much about the U.S. as they may think?

Absolutely. I had just picked up a Japanese friend from the airport and was speeding to get home when I was pulled over by the police. She was petrified. She thought he was going to pull me out of the car and point a gun at me.
Apparently she regularly watched a US TV show that realistically represents our everyday lives: Cops!
She was shocked that he was such a gentleman. Of course!

What I hear from people who move here is they thought America was a place you can easily make money, and everything is very fair, and thay freedom means you can do whatever you want. Then they get here and are surprised you have to work very hard to acheive things, knowing someone still cam be a benefit to get you in or a leg up, and America has all sorts of laws that seem to inhibit freedom.

One thing that has caught me off balance a few times is people from outside the U.S. generalizing from whatever one place they’ve visited or even lived in. I remember one man from somewhere in the Middle East going on at some length about how Americans are this and Americans do that. His depiction of Americans struck me as very odd, even though he had lived here for some years by then. I asked him what he was basing his impressions on, and he said, “Well, that’s what I’ve seen around here.” “Around here” was Silicon Valley. I had to explain to him that to the rest of the country, California is typically seen as a little strange and that most Americans would not fit his description at all. I don’t think he understood.

However, I imagine that even in the very smallest countries there are regional differences, starting with city folk versus country folk, and those effects are only going to be magnified in a multicultural society like ours. My guess is that people within any country are much more aware of their differences and people outside are much more aware of their similarities, exactly as it is all the way down to units as small as the family. I think my brothers look so different that you can’t tell they’re related; a friend looked at a picture of them together and said they look exactly alike.

It depends per country how much they know.

@Jeruba I remind my inlaws of the very same thing. Southeast FL is not like the rest of the US. Some of the things they complain about don’t exist, or barely exist in the midwest.

In many cases, sure.

On the other hand, compare a “typical foreigner” (who we suppose may only have a very limited understanding of American culture from having seen American films) to a “typical American” – how many other country’s films or other cultural offerings have typical Americans even seen or heard of (except possibly through American TV shows about foreign travel) at best?

Well, I can only speak for Europe. Discounting series and movies, when you simply count the number of minutes of news reports on American topics compared to news reports in the US on Europe or the rest of the world my estimate is a ratio of at least 20:1

So sadly the “flack” is somewhat justified.

Americans are NOT stupid – WITH SUBTITLES

Intelligence and knowing about the world outside your own country are two different things.

Even though I feel this argument might happen for most foreign nations, but I feel the Canadian/American relation is very different. Many Canadians I know have a much greater knowledge of America than vice versa. A really great program that used to be on as a short during This Hour has 22 Minutes was Rick Mercer’s “Talk with Americans”. I know that it is only the worst of the worst, but it’s still funny!