I don't know if it's just me, but lately the amount of interesting stuff (articles, software) i come across that sadly is only available in chinese keeps increasing.
If it wasn't for these groups of volunteers that translate them to english (and the other way around, also useful) these projects would be completely unaccessible.
Reading and writing the alphabet, yes. The grammar and pronunciation rules for speakers (not the pronunciation itself)? English is quite a bit more difficult than most people realize.
You can learn Pinyin in a few days, which is sufficient for you to pronounce any Mandarin Chinese romanized into Pinyin. Chinese grammar is fairly simple compared to Latin languages. Whereas English is a rats nest of special-need-to-memorize pronunciation rules.
Most of the real difficulty people experience with Chinese comes from the shock of learning the characters.
Coming from Dutch, I found English easier than German. Some people say German is so close, it's mutually intelligible with Dutch: not only is it not, I even find it much harder than English.
At least from my perspective, someone who knows a language very close to another and still found English easier than this other language, English is easy.
Pronunciation is indeed quite a lot of learning by heart, but it's not hard to get used to if you got the rest down. Of course, this might be much harder for Chinese, I wouldn't know.
Two things:
1. As an English-native-speaker who also learned German I find that I can mostly understand spoken and written Dutch through my German. I think part of your difficulty there is that it is closer to your native language where you have very tight internal rules about how the language should be, so get caught up in those differences. On my side my internal rules on German are relatively loose, so Dutch mostly fits in there.
2. One good-sized chunk of the messiness of English pronunciation (vs. written words) is actually the fault of the Dutch. Prior to the printing press spelling was more an art than a science, and the same transcribed book could be found with different spellings (especially true in different regions). Since the Dutch were the first ones with the printing press, many English books of the time were printed there, and the Dutch printers made some pretty arbitrary decisions on how they thought English should be spelled (e.g. the 'h' in 'ghost'). There was a similar effect from French scribes when they invaded England.
Now my no means were they they only ones to mess up English (read up on "The Great Vowel Shift" if you want a headache), but they did their part.
What an amazing illustration of how humor can be lost across language boundaries. You have to have experience in both English and Chinese to know how hilarious that statement is. It's genius to write it in English and deliver it so deadpan to readers who won't know to laugh out loud when they see it.
9 strokes is a lot in Chinese, but relatively few in English. And despite what anyone says, you can't learn English using phonics or any other method except bulk memorization. In English, every word and every one of its derivatives has to be memorized. Past tense, possessive, plural, everything has to be memorized. Nobody bats an eye at this. Learning 8 strokes for "tree" is easy, but the 4 strokes for the Chinese equivalent is hard. 12 strokes for "water" is easy. 5 strokes in Chinese is hard. Oh, and throw on 4 more strokes in English if you turn it into a verb and use the past tense, "watered". Unless you write "did water" instead and split them up with a noun in between: "did you water". What a disaster.
I am a native English speaker. I like to think I am decent at it. Better than most of the people with whom I speak in person. But did I just use "whom" correctly? And did I just start a sentence with "but"? And "and"? And leave out the subject? Is this even proper English?
Yeah, this touches on something i believed for a long time but every time i mentioned it i got (at best) push back: we make the software way too localization friendly, when we shouldn't do that because what we end up doing is enabling people create intellectual silos - we enable the division inherent in using different languages.
If you had to use software in English, regardless of your native language (and mine is not English, it does not even have a latin alphabet) you'd need to have at least some proficiency with being able to read it which sooner or later make you able to write it.
I've seen that first hand: i am 99% self-taught when it comes to English and the only reason for that is that when i started using computers and got interested in programming, everything was in English. I had to learn it, otherwise i wouldn't be able to use my computers.
(and FWIW i wouldn't be surprised if a major reason that Japanese programmers are both bad at English and they tend to use their own and/or different software than the rest of the world today does is that they got translated documentation, software and computers from the earlier days of computing - essentially creating an unnecessary big barrier between themselves and the rest of the world)
What you are saying goes beyond software, should all books be in English? Should all content on the Internet be written in English?
In my opinion it would create a really sad mono-culture...
Each language carry part of its history and culture that can't be translated at all.
It would also prevent a big part of the population to access any content. Even if you apply it to software only, it means that a big part of the world wouldn't be able to use any of those.
Now, if the software that you need to use to be able to learn English are in English, that becomes even more of an issue...
Also, why English in particular? For a huge amount of the world population it requires to learn a new alphabet. It becomes a much more complex requirement.
Language division prevents a big part of the population to access content even more.
Is everyone supposed to learn Chinese to be able to read interesting articles ? What about Korean ? What about Wolof ?
Sharing a common language bring a lot to mankind as a whole, and is more effective to create bridges between people than most other means. Local languages are of course welcome and should be kept around for culture, but I do think that refusing to use a common language is a loss.
As for why English, well it's a bit late to ask the question imho : English has been picked as a common language quite a few years ago. There was French in Europe before, latin before that, but now it's English. I'm not especially happy about it either, since I'm not a native speaker, but here we are, and it's kind of pointless to fight against it when a big and diverse part of the world population already speak English (diverse is important, having 2 billion of people speaking a language in only one country is not really helpful for a common language).
> having 2 billion of people speaking a language in only one country is not really helpful for a common language
Apparently it is, otherwise we wouldn't be in thread discussing more and more interesting content only being available in Chinese. Users will learn whatever language provides content they want to consume. For me that was English. My parents learned Russian. I'd not be surprised if the next generation learns Chinese, though I'd prefer not having to do so (parents english isn't great).
Your arguments for English keeping its spot are kind of weak. It was surprising to read how few people speaking english. Wiki "English-speaking world" states just 500m-1b global and first language is less than 360m, 2/3 of those in the US. Class differences might ensure there is still more content produced in english, but china might catch up quickly and having just half as many speakers doesn't give a good head start. It being close to European languages might help, at doesn't require to learn a totally new alphabet. I would have expected English to get a nice boost due to geopolitics, but am not sure that is the cast past 2016. The US is still highly influence, due to media exports and probably most importantly dominance on the internet. China's firewall/separated Internet might save English. Though it might also protect their own language long enough to start to produce enough content to export...
Actually, I just realized how few recent popular Chinese films I've heard of. Guess I'll choose some to download, now.
> I'm not especially happy about it either, since I'm not a native speaker, but here we are
Many of us native speakers aren't happy about it either, English is a terrible language. I have a 6-year old daughter, and across the years we have spent teaching her language skills I have learned just how messy English actually is. Watching DVDs and reading books about pronunciation rules that quite frankly even I never quite grasped until teaching my own child, it's enough to make your head spin.
> What you are saying goes beyond software, should all books be in English? Should all content on the Internet be written in English?
Yes.
> In my opinion it would create a really sad mono-culture... Each language carry part of its history and culture that can't be translated at all.
That history and culture is only relevant to those who are interested in history and cultures, not to everyone. I am not against this, nor against other languages. People can still use English as a second language, i am talking about having a common language so we can communicate with each other, not a single language.
> It would also prevent a big part of the population to access any content. Even if you apply it to software only, it means that a big part of the world wouldn't be able to use any of those.
My point is that that population should learn to at least read English so that not only they will be able to use the software, but also read the texts from other people outside the silo that their own native language creates.
> Now, if the software that you need to use to be able to learn English are in English, that becomes even more of an issue...
No, the software to learn English can be in any language. In fact i'd rather see all the effort that goes into internationalization and localization to be placed instead into creating better software, tutorials, documentation and other materials for software that teaches people English.
> Also, why English in particular? For a huge amount of the world population it requires to learn a new alphabet. It becomes a much more complex requirement.
Because it is already used as i mention by a very large number of people, especially around computers.
The alphabet isn't a big issue, as i wrote above, i had to learn it myself and English has one of the most compact and easy to learn alphabets.
In the future perhaps humans will move towards a more common language but if you answer "yes" to the questions "Should all books be in English?" and "Should all content on the Internet be written in English?" then it isn't any different than variations of cultural chauvinism throughout documented human history.
Nobody is obligated to go through the hassle of learning a new language just because someone else wanted that knowledge (volunteering to share, however, is perfectly fine). Otherwise it is a blatant infringement of personal freedom. Multilingualism should also be multi-directional instead of converging towards a single language, but that is obviously something unnoticed by a lot of Anglos who for one reason or another have decided their language and culture should trump over all else.
I'm not interested in whatever cultural issues some might have, especially since people put too much irrational emotion in their language.
Languages are primarily a tool for communication and i am interested in the practicality of improving that communication - if two people speak different languages and without any common one, they simply cannot communicate.
I do not care if it would be English, Chinese, French or whatever else, that choice is irrelevant. I only said Yes to English because of its popularity, widespread use among many different countries and its position when it comes to computers (which was my original point above).
English has 982 million speakers, 2nd most right behind Chinese. Turns out, a lot of people in Europe and India speak it fluently as a second language.
There are people who speak Chinese outside of China to make up for it, for 910 million native speakers and an additional 200 million L2 fluent speakers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese
> English isn't even in top 4 of world spoken languages
By what measurement? Wikipedia gives Mandarin > Spanish > English > Hindi for native speakers[0] and English > Mandarin > Hindi > Spanish for all speakers.[1]
Almost 1/5 of all humans are chinese. Maybe it's time to learn the language. Of course there are tonnes of smart people there doing interesting things.
If it wasn't for these groups of volunteers that translate them to english (and the other way around, also useful) these projects would be completely unaccessible.