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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It was a historical commentary on the kind of problem that pictographic languages have. But to expand on the answer, think about programming languages, scientific writings, films, games, the internet itself - it’s all in English. And to make matters worse, the ccp had the stupid idea of locking the population inside a firewall, which limits exposure to each other, inside and outside china. I mean, even if someone wanted to learn Chinese, who would they talk to for training? I know that where I live I’ve never seen anyone speaking Chinese. “Edit But I’ve had contact with Japanese people (there’s a big community here) and some people from other countries like Germany and Italy, and in those cases the common language was English.”


  • “but Chinese feels rougher” From what I’ve seen so far (correct me if I’m wrong) it’s a very intonation-dependent language, which must be hell to learn, I can hardly get the pronunciation or intonation right speaking a language other than my native one. “Also, other Chinese people can be bloody rude when I’m trying to speak Chinese” they say that French people have this attitude too, and I don’t understand the logic of it, I’m happy when someone is at least trying to speak my language.


  • You certainly can, and I’m not using that as an excuse, just a historical example.

    I have nothing against the people of China, but why would I learn Chinese? I mean from an objective point of view, in how many places will I be able to speak Chinese? I can go online now and talk to Japanese, Germans, French, Spanish, Russians people in English and even if they can’t speak very well, most of them will understand at least something of what I’ve written. All the major programming languages are in English, all scientific papers have at least an abstract in English. It’s purely a question of relevance.

    If the real world was civilization, English would have already won by Culture.