You'll Need to Learn Chinese to Read the Internet

[hellwig]

Chinese is spoken by the Chinese, English is used pretty much by everyone else (for official purposes), including many Chinese. Yes, there are billions of Chinese, but the global market has, for the most part, settled on English. When my products start saying 中国制造 instead of "Made In China", then I'll start worrying.

 

[agnickolov]

Nice theory . Fortunately, the colonial days are over. In USA we just benefit from the success of England, being former part of its colonial empire...

 

[Kahless01]

buncha americans too lazy to learn another language is what im reading. and throwing such a fit because it was suggested, xenophobes? firefly was a badass show btw. and latin is the universal language that spawned most of what europe speaks. english is one of the hardest languages to learn for anyone else. its a gross bastardization of german. learn one of the romance languages and youll probably be able to pick up the other ones pretty quickly.

 

[nforce4max]

I hate this globalist propaganda, the elites have for a long time built up China on the backs of it's people who work as slaves while destroying the futures of millions in Europe and America.

 

[digiex]

They are invisible in Facebook map.

 

[AMDnoob]

yeah.. lemme take a stab at a number... 80%; the number of internet sites in chinese that have little to no relevance to a reader who speak primarily english, *boom* roasted.

 

[tseska69]

[citation][nom]nforce4max[/nom]I hate this globalist propaganda, the elites have for a long time built up China on the backs of it's people who work as slaves while destroying the futures of millions in Europe and America.[/citation]
Gelnn Beck, is that you?

 

[tseska69]

[citation][nom]tseska69[/nom]Gelnn Beck, is that you?[/citation]

err, spelling fail....

 

[Silmarunya]

Well, I don't see how this changes anything. The dominance of English hasn't exactly caused other world languages like Spanish, French or German to disappear from the world wide web.

There's plenty of room for everyone, so how is this news?

Of course, it's a good motivation to learn Chinese. I might learn it some day (I don't really get where Americans get this 'English is good enough for everyone'-attitude from, can't you see learning multiple languages is a good thing?)

 

[maestintaolius]

The thing that irritates me most about china is I spent my time learning Japanese to do business in Asia and German for Europe. My German is still quite helpful but my Japanese isn't all that useful now so I guess I have to start working on learning Chinese.

 

[kkiddu]

Errr..I have to point out that India's internet presence is growing as well, and most of us use English online. So I think with that and with English being preferred by US, Canada, Europe, Australia, we certainly have a good chance to keep English dominant.

And even if Chinese still becomes dominant, it'll not mix with the mainstream internet. I mean, I never see a website in any other language on the net unless I specifically look for it. My language preferences take care of that. What will happen is that there will be lots of Chinese websites that are invisible to other users.

 

[DokkRokken]

I'm all for this. I can only speak English, but if this means I will not have to contend with as many terribly spelled, horribly conjugated, and altogether embarrassing examples of 'English' that can be found on YouTube, various forums, or TomsHardware, then I for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords.

 

[jaysbob]

the internet should have a multitude of languages and cultures. It's a global communication tool, people should have access in whatever language they are most comfortable in. This sort of thing isn't mutually exclusive. even if Chinese becomes the most common language there will still be plenty of English (and others) for those that don't speak Chinese. Even if Chinese does someday become the universal language of the internet, it's not as if you're going to roll out of bed one day and find google is suddenly incomprehensible.

 

[kingssman]

My question is, is there any good chinese sites? Something that isn't chinese govt sanctioned propaganda

 

[elkein]

The Chinese don't even have a fully consolidated modern language, it's just not going to happen. Kind of like base 12 and/or base 16 math is superior to base 10, no amount of touting the metric system at base ten will fix the facts.

 

[loomis86]

[citation][nom]Silmarunya[/nom]Well, I don't see how this changes anything. The dominance of English hasn't exactly caused other world languages like Spanish, French or German to disappear from the world wide web. There's plenty of room for everyone, so how is this news? Of course, it's a good motivation to learn Chinese. I might learn it some day (I don't really get where Americans get this 'English is good enough for everyone'-attitude from, can't you see learning multiple languages is a good thing?)[/citation]

Cant you see the benefit of one universal language? You don't think the one universal language should be english, ok fine. Pick one and see if you can convince the world to adopt it. Until then, the rest of us that know english will be using english.

 

[Bluescreendeath]

This article is fail. China has one of the largest English populations in the world...

 

[jaghpanther]

But which Chinese language are they speaking about? As Elkien pointed out, there are several "Chinese" languages. I remember seeing stats a while back that claimed India would surpass China in population by 2050. Does this mean in the next couple of years we'll see a chart stating that the dominate language on the net could be...English or variations there of?

 

[icepick314]

until programing language comes in some other language than English, let me know....

 

[bv90andy]

so your telling me that you'll switch tomshardware to all-chinese? no? then it does not matter.