You'll Need to Learn Chinese to Read the Internet

[Guest]

funny little factoid: more people in China speak English than America.

 

[anon69]

misleading title. The information suggests that the number of users in China is increasing. That has little to do with the languages used by people outside of China.

 

[aaron88_7]

While everybody else complains about learning a new language, I think I'll learn it to distinguish myself from other potential employees. Should bump my pay range up a bit...

 

[Guest]

Chinese? Never. NEVER.
Japanese? Oh HELL YES ANYTIME SOON!

 

[wild9]

[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]

The same interests who put the "change" agenda into motion, and destroy our borders whilst using the media to demonise those who resist their vile regime. America is now practically owned by a consortium of foreign interests that represent not the majority but the minority. These interests all speak the same language.

 

[chick0n]

many of these "fuxk Chinese" post are loaded with grammar errors ... so ... if Americans can't speak proper English then ...

 

[freedomisimpossible]

stupid american people.. 😉

 

[marraco]

[citation][nom]loomis86[/nom]Even chinese people prefer english for technical things once they learn it. It's pretty hard to write a paper about fiber optic data transmission theory in chinese and even harder to type it on a computer...and worst of all, you limit yourself to a smaller audience if you do.[/citation]

You are completely wrong.
In the last 2 decades, most of the new and better books were of Chinese authorship (although written on English).

I visited universitary libraries all this time, and I saw all the new books being "converted" to Chinese authors.

But now they not only are of Chinese authors, but really written in Chinese.

Just go to nVidia, and check the list of recommended books to learn CUDA. Half of them are on Chinese, and the others have Chinese authors.

Chinese writing is extremely hard to learn. With 5000 symbols, you barely are able to read a newspaper. It takes 25000 symbols to be fluent.

Chinese learn English easily, but we can't do the other way. The effect is that China has an important competitive advantage. It's like having all his books encrypted for us.

Even mainstream English publications recognize that China will overtake USA in just 10 years:

http/www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/12/save_date

Living in denial will solve nothing.

 

[rickl7069]

It kind of depends on your personal life, doesn't it?
If your work involves dealing regularly with the Chinese, then it could be financially beneficial to learn that language. However, I, personally, don't know one person that speaks Chinese and I don't know anyone that works with them. To learn Chinese would not benefit me in any way and if it did in some tiny way, would the payout really be worth the effort?
In fact, like most people I know, learning ANY other language would not financially benefit me in any way, therefore the massive amount of time it would take to learn another language would be better spent making a living.
If I just want to learn a language for fun, I would rather spend my time learning a more universal language - music.

 

[Guest]

dfgdgadgadfgadfg

 

[hang-the-9]

[citation][nom]robertking82881[/nom]i take it there not enofe Chinese speaking English . maybe there changing to much to LEARN ENGLISH THERE! LEARN ENGLISH . or use a GOOGLE TRANSLATOR OR JUST USE CHROME PROBLEM FIXD . Chinese can kiss my ass they not gonna force people in to learning Chinese they need to learn english . i dont understand Chinese has more people they should have more information on web then we do.[/citation]
... speaking of needing to learn English... ^

 

[Guest]

The Chinese internet is so restricted that 100 million of those users are just duplicating sites that already exist in English but cannot be seen by users inside the borders of China. I'm willing to bet that if the Chinese users could do what they wanted on the internet most of the sites created in Chinese wouldn't exist.

 

[Lutfij]

I aint a racist but erm, Chinese language won't be a language just cos of its populace...while i was reading the article, i thought they might've conquered silicon valley and deemed Chinese the new world language. 😛 i hope that doesn't happen.

 

[HalJordan]

How to get the English speaking world to learn Chinese (or any other language): Mandate that all pornography websites be presented in Chinese. In one month we are all bilingual.

 

[tommysch]

OMG we will miss all those important tweeter updates about some random Chinese teen picking up a hamburger at some random fast food chain!!! What will we do?

 

[dealcorn]

I am no fan of the Chinese government but they have been recently effective at upgrading their peoples standard of living. Internet access is part of a better live even in China and there are a lot of them. In due course, Chinese will be the principal language for delivering a better life through the Internet. That's what IPv6 is about. The pond gets big enough for everyone to grow with no displacement. Is someone saying that is a problem?

 

[quantum mask]

I've always wondered how in the world a Chinese dictionary works. They don't have an alphabet, so what order are the words in? I know in Japanese they do it in the order of the stroke count, but I'm sure in chinese there are at least 100 characters with 8 strokes.

Oh, and sorry guys, English is probably here to stay for quite some time. Think of the reasons why Latin and Greek (which were dominant laguages at one time) lost their clout. Usually it was due to military dominance of the prevailing language. China doesn't seem interested in world domination, at least on a military level.

 

[tommysch]

[citation][nom]HalJordan[/nom]How to get the English speaking world to learn Chinese (or any other language): Mandate that all pornography websites be presented in Chinese. In one month we are all bilingual.[/citation]

They will learn English since we own the porn. There should be a simple reading skill question to enter every porn site. Everyone with an Internet connection* in China would speak English in a matter of weeks.


*subject to change without prior notice on a whim from the Politburo of the Communist Party of China. The party is not responsible for any jailing by the not-controlled by the party judiciary branch of the government. Have a nice day in China!

 

[g-thor]

I see a sad trend here. several posters seem to think it is fine to require the rest of the world to adopt English, but God forbid that any other country should require an anglophone to learn another language.

How many non-anglophones have you worked with? How much do you really know about the other countries of the world? Do you know what anglophone means? (Hint: it's an English word listed in any good dictionary.)

I live in an officially bilingual country, English is my mothertongue and I am reasonably functional in our second language. I have a large group of friends who come from Africa, and most of them are, at the least, bilingual or trilingual. Some of them speak 5 languages. While their English isn't the same as mine, it is as good as many forum posters I read (not just Tom's). And I have met people who think they are stupid because their English isn't as good as an anglophone's.

We North americans need to take the blinders off, drop the idea that we are superior to everyone else and then we can begin to learn. Yes, we have a magnificent level of living here, but we are not inherently superior to others. All living, breathing humanoid units must work daily at being better humans, and learning to understand others is a nice start.

/end Sermon

 

[leafman420]

um isn't English spoken by more people China then in the United States?