
The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin - MOTF
https://medium.com/@dantin1/the-internet-is-multilingual-but-you-need-to-learn-mandarin-558c15ab5158
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iorrus
Is this a serious article? I know Intelligent people who have studied Mandarin
for 10 years actively making an effort and are still unable to read a
newspaper. So it’s extremely unlikely that mandarin will become a dominant
text based language, possibly might become more popular for verbal
communication in Africa and places like that.

~~~
darthoctopus
the assertion being made here is not that Mandarin will become a dominant
text-based language; it already is one. rather, the argument is that the
ascendancy of China, abetted by its economic strategy in the developing world,
will force Mandarin into a more central position on the Internet, like it or
not.

~~~
nix23
>will force Mandarin into a more central position on the Internet, like it or
not.

Not really, compare it to Spanish. China will also have to understand that the
World is bigger then China, the rest of the World accepted English as THE
technical language of "choice". Chinese have to learn English, like it or not.

~~~
bobbyz
The difference between Spanish and Mandarin is that Mandarin is much more
information dense. In fact, it's the only widely spoken language more
information dense than English.

Aside from that, english is just such a meh language. Asian kids get higher
math scores in part because mandarin's numbering system actually makes sense
('eleven, twelve, thirteen' don't include the words one, two, or three, while
the numerical representations include 1, 2, 3). You can consistently memorize
a phone number in mandarin, but you can't in english because the syllables are
too long. Thinking about money in mandarin biases people towards long term
saving, while thinking about money in English biases people towards short term
spending.

Basically, it's like a less drastic version of the movie 'Arrival'. I think
not long after the idea that language can actively be designed to our benefit
becomes more popular, we might be speaking an entirely language altogether.
Language design is unlike city design or technology design in that there are
no technological or budgetary constraints, no 'real world' tradeoffs to make.
You can theoretically invent the perfect language tomorrow and it wouldn't
cost you anything except time. One of the only things that can improve humans
for basically free.

~~~
tuxxy
> Aside from that, english is just such a meh language. Asian kids get higher
> math scores in part because mandarin's numbering system actually makes sense
> ('eleven, twelve, thirteen' don't include the words one, two, or three,
> while the numerical representations include 1, 2, 3).

This doesn't represent a fact of any sort of linguistic truth whatsoever.

~~~
bobbyz
These are research findings, not my own ideas:
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for-
math-1410...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for-
math-1410304008)

~~~
wenc
This idea has been floating around for decades (wouldn't surprise me some
researchers decided to test it), but its exact claims are only around ease of
counting and arithmetic (the very basic levels), not mathematics as a whole.

Ease of counting numerals doesn't necessarily translate to overall
mathematical ability. French and Russian have fairly complicated numerals, but
many of the world's best mathematicians also happen to be French and Russian
speaking... and of course, English speaking.

At the higher levels of mathematics, abstract thinking becomes more important
than arithmetic. It's not obvious to me that facility at arithmetic is
necessarily advantageous then. In fact, I wonder if highly inflected languages
(Latin-derived) or those with complex grammars (Hungarian, Slavic) train the
brain to work with symbols more efficiently.

~~~
bobbyz
You may be right about the abstract thinking, but if we're talking strictly in
terms of PISA test scores, Russia and France performed only slightly above
average in a fairly recent year. However, I acknowledge that measuring
mathematical proficiency with test scores alone is flawed.

------
hyperman1
I'm from Belgium. In the past, you needed to speak French in Belgium, even if
the majority is Dutch-speaking. The people with money or power spoke French,
if you wanted to have a voice, you spoke French. So people gave their
companies French names, spoke French, read French newspapers,... Now,because
of a variety of reasons, French lost a lot of its power. And in Flanders,
younger generations and companies mostly stopped using French as second
language.

Now, starting at world war 2, English received the status of international
default language because of economic and political reasons. Hollywood and the
internet amplified it. It is hard in younger western generations to find
someone not speaking English. Even local bakeries choose an English name.
Doesn't make much sense, but thats what you do today.

We're seeing now the economic and political rise of China, combined with a
loss of power from the USA. It makes sense that the international default
language will shift again.

Arguments like 'too hard', 'complucated', 'inefficient', 'people already made
the choice'? These wont matter. We've seen these in the past.

Reality is simple: You adapt to the current power or you get marginalized. The
only relevant question is wether China can reach the status of most powerful
country or not.

This is also the kind of advancement that happens a funeral at the time. We
mostly wont spend the effort to change our second language. But the next
generation?

~~~
wenc
English has another advantage: it's the language of "cool", i.e. a kind of
soft power. It's the language of hip-hop, of Hollywood, of tech and of
finance. English is a prestige language is many parts of the world not only
due to its incumbency, but because new pop culture is being created in it
every day.

People learn languages for all kinds of practical reasons, but ultimately for
a language to really take off, it has to endow personal prestige in some way
and provide a window into a culture that is interesting or aspirational.
People learn French and Italian due to the aspirational qualities of those
languages. In contrast, relatively few people are learning Indonesian (outside
of Indonesia) even though Indonesia is the 4th largest country in the world
(yes!) by population, potentially a huge emerging market, plus Indonesian is a
super simple language.

It seems to me the Chinese language does not currently have much currency in
the soft power domain, partly because soft power requires the export of
desirable cultural goods, which in turn requires a society that endows the
creators of cultural products with freedom of expression. This freedom
currently exists in Taiwan but Taiwan struggles with scale. This used to exist
in HK, but the HK cultural industry has been on a decline since 1997 (and HK
exports its cultural products in Cantonese).

Japanese is arguably a harder language than Chinese, yet the Internet is full
of foreigners trying to learn it because they're into anime etc.

------
vslira
"You _Need_ to Learn Mandarin" is needlessly inflammatory, but yes, I would
like to learn Mandarin, actually.

English is not my first language, but having learned it allows me to consume
content from the English-speaking world and SOME content from non-english
speakers who choose English (and rightfully so) as their net language.

I'd love to learn other languages to be able to interact with more people and
ideas. Imagine speaking English, Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic. Being able to
communicate with over 3 billion people in their own terms. Engage in the
discussions that they're having about their lives, in their words. That would
be great.

~~~
rathel
Weren't it for the really un-pragmatic script, I'd considering it learning it
as well, even if just for the "it's frustrating there's something outside of
our reach". Because, well, it is.

~~~
bobbyz
You're right about the script, it's not optimal for computer input.

~~~
bobbyz
I'm wrong actually, apparently pinyin is really fast

------
lurquer
English wasn’t the default due to a head start with the internet.

It was dominant due to a British Empire that stretched across the world for
CENTURIES. English is still the predominant language for all international
shipping, aviation, and financial transactions.

This same type of talk occurred in the 80’s when folks were encouraged to
learn Japanese as it would soon be the new lingua Franca.

In the grand scheme of things, it obvious and not fairly deniable that
pictographic languages are incompatible with a computer-based culture. While
the spoken Chinese language will survive, the written form will be an unused
relic in a century or two.

~~~
bobbyz
English is indeed better suited for a conventional computer keyboard, coding,
and reading left to right. However, to me it's still unclear how much of this
advantage is due to the fact that computers were specifically designed for
english speakers.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It's not just that computers were specifically designed for english speakers.
It's that, even trying to specifically design for chinese speakers, it winds
up clumsy to use. It doesn't matter the input method - big 4, pinyin, bopomofo
- they're considerably clumsier than just typing out english or spanish or
icelandish on a keyboard.

You may say that the problem is the small keyboard. But if you make the
keyboard big enough, it takes three people to operate. (Literally - I have
seen such a keyboard, for Kanji. It was huge. One person couldn't run it,
because some of the shift keys were not within arm's reach of the keys they
shifted.) So that's not an answer for most people.

Ideograph-based languages are clumsier to type than alphabet-based languages.
They just are, and there is no great solution. The very information density
that you keep harping on works against them in this respect.

~~~
bobbyz
Hmm I seem to be misinformed. I totally forgot to think about pinyin.
Apparently it's as fast or faster than english. For example, hitting
"jtkqwrhyz" on your keyboard will give you "Jin-tian kong-qi wu-ran hen yan-
zhong" which translates to "The air pollution is pretty severe today". I don't
type in pinyin though.

------
kerng
Written simplified Chinese already mostly replaced the traditional Chinese way
of writing - mainly Taiwan still keeps traditional Chinese alive.

A few decades in the future written Chinese will probably be unused or
extremly further simplified, or more converge with English in some way.
Traditional writing you can study in school as elective.

~~~
otoburb
>> _Written simplified Chinese already mostly replaced the traditional Chinese
way of writing - mainly Taiwan still keeps traditional Chinese alive._

Hong Kong and Macau does too, although it seems a transition is underway to
shift to simplified writing.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters#Hong_Kong_and_Macau)

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perl4ever
Does this mean the spoken language Mandarin, or written Chinese, which I
didn't think was called Mandarin?

I've been thinking learning to read Simplified Chinese writing, alone, might
be useful, for someone who doesn't want to go to China.

Looking at the Wikipedia page on Kangxi radicals made the task seem relatively
much more feasible:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical)

~~~
senkora
If you just want to learn the characters, then these books provide a good
system:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji_and_Re...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembering_the_Kanji_and_Remembering_the_Hanzi)

I’m 1000 characters in after 4 months of 1 hour a day study, but some people
report quicker progress, so YMMV.

You’ll still need to learn a bunch of words though, since most words in
Mandarin are two characters long.

Written Chinese is still called Mandarin. There’s Literary Chinese, which is
different, but you don’t want to learn that.

There’s no standard way to write other Chinese languages, like Cantonese, in
characters. People still do but there’s no standard for it.

------
john4534243
For what so that my content get censored behind the great firewall of ccp
china

~~~
bobbyz
Explain to me what language has to do with the great firewall. Are you
implying that if I switch my iPhone keyboard to Mandarin, my speech will
automatically get censored by the firewall?

~~~
john4534243
> Explain to me what language has to do with the great firewall.

This is too obvious to explain. The language is spoken by 1.5 billion people
who are behind the firewall and why would i have to create a content in that
language when i have the option to create the content in English which most
democratic country population is literate of.

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naveen99
Really google translate needs to learn mandarin. Multilingualism for humans is
going the way of memorizing books, into history.

