The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin
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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?
Language efficiency gains are part of human evolution.
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.
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.
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.
This doesn't represent a fact of any sort of linguistic truth whatsoever.
Than English...that article is complete bullshit, the Inuits have 30 different words for snow = more information density, but is it usable for every culture?
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.
That has absolutely nothing to do with usability.
I'm not sure what this means. I do memorize phone numbers in english, albeit not very much these days due to the phone address book. But this made me contemplate whether I am memorizing the words or the numbers. When I repeat my phone number to myself, I "hear" the english words, but I "see" the numbers.
There are more authoritative sources but this is what I found: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/07/01/137527742/c...
Also, when I say them aloud or in my head, mandarin numbers are clearly shorter.
Upon further research, it seems like Vietnamese is also very information dense.
That has nothing to say, compare it to programming languages, is the language with the least LOC's the best language? No, often its a mix.
Suddenly, bandwidth decreases by 20%, downloads are 20% faster, server costs decrease 20%, data centre energy usage decreases by 20%, greenhouse gases from data centres decrease by 20%, and so global warming slows down by _% and on and on. Sure it won't be 20%, it might not be nearly that in many cases, but think about the magnitude of the rube goldberg of unknown efficiency increases you'll set off.
>Suddenly, bandwidth decreases by 20%, downloads are 20% faster
Who is thinking from a programmer perspective now? Compression is not always a good thing, and for sure not in natural language.
I have an instant reaction doubting that statement. Not because the numbers are obviously wrong in themselves or I think you made them up or the source was lying.
It implies a precision such that 1/3 s != 1/4 s. The difference is 80 ms.
To be a meaningful statement, it implies that the speed measured can be characterized to some fraction of 80 ms, and that the variance within english and mandarin speakers is also significantly smaller. I cannot conceive of that being the case.
This sounds like absolute baloney. What is your basis for claiming this?
Here's a starting point: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=222702...
What are the odds of that happening with Mandarin?
Sure, it might be “central“ to understanding the discourse of almost a quarter of the world’s population, but then the same argument could be made for Hindi.
Also, let’s not forget that Chinese discourse is not free, and that will negatively affect the centrality of all of its languages.
I can't see how China can ascend much further. They are hedged in by powerful nations who see China's military ambitions as their own loss. They have no allies of note and are bordered by several unstable regions (some of whom possess nuclear weapons).
Economically, they have already converted the bulk of their regional citizens to urban workers. Their growth is largely bound to the debt expansion they promote and, while they are hardly alone in this, they are centralising and making their economy more rigid rather than making it flexible enough to cope with the inevitable restructure.
Politicians and public servants appear (from my perspective) to make decisions based on who these will make happy and who they will upset.
The Chinese culture does not appear to be making any headway into selling itself to the world. Few people want to immigrate to China and become Chinese (outside of academic interest of course), but the West remains a destination for people who want to take a chance on making a fortune.
Lastly China has walled off its internet. While they are happy for brigading to occur on certain topics, they must balance this need with the possibility that someone might compare Xi to a certain pooh bear or be reminded of Tienanmen Square for all the wrong reasons.
There are paths China might take to global ascendancy. There are no signs that they are willing, much less capable, of walking them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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:
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.
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.