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Chinese will rule the World Wide Web | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5999 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 9 of 121 13 July 2011 at 3:19am | IP Logged | ||
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What valuable information is there that is published in Chinese before English?
Honestly, I don't even know how people can entertain the idea of Chinese becoming important. Even the information that is translated INTO Chinese is very poor in quality. I have first hand comments from a development manager at Microsoft China -- he told me that half of the programming books which have been translated aren't even worth reading in Chinese because you have to know English to read them. Literally, the translation is so poorly done that if you do not already know the grammar of English you won't be able to make heads or tails of the awkward Chinese the original text has been rendered into. He wasn't the only Chinese person to suggest something like this to me... it blows my mind that it is even possible, cause I absolutely have never in my life seen anything translated into English that had even the remotest hint of unnaturalness and foreign- language-affectedness. Edited by parasitius on 13 July 2011 at 3:21am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 121 13 July 2011 at 8:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Had I thought Chinese would become the dominate language in 20 years I would have studied it now. And I am not. Internet and the media are so English dominated that it would take a much longer period of time to change that.
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| oldearth Groupie United States Joined 4896 days ago 72 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 11 of 121 13 July 2011 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'll be surprised if any language without a latin alphabet ever takes over the internet. The latin alphabet makes
it easy to input text and is easy to read even at relatively small size. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| napoleon Tetraglot Senior Member India Joined 5017 days ago 543 posts - 874 votes Speaks: Bengali*, English, Hindi, Urdu Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 12 of 121 13 July 2011 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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There's no denying the fact that China is the most populous country on the face of the earth. It is also one of the fastest growing economies. As a result, Mandarin chinese, its official language has captured the interest of the world stage.
However, before we get carried away with such enthusiasm, let us not overlook the following factors: * Chinese and Mandarin are not mutually interchangable terms although it is a common mistake to do so. *Mandarin is one of the (six?) major dialects of Chinese. *Not all chinese are native speakers of mandarin though most are able to speak it. *As Ari has already mentioned, the exponential growth of Mandarin's importance within China can be attributed to the one-language-policy of the Chinese government. [I'll defer to Ari's take on matters concerning China anyday. He is one of the few westerners on this forum who have achieved an advanced ablility in Mandarin. Not only that, he has an advanced grasp of Cantonese as well.] *The Chinese government's attempts at censorship of the media including the internet keeps this tremendous growth contained and localised behind the Great fireWall of China. *Again, thanks to their government's policy, there are more chinese who are learning English than foreigners who are learning Chinese. *While Chinese may be popular today as the language of economic growth and business opportunities; let us not forget that just several years earlier, Russian used to occupy a similar exalted pedestal. In coonclusion, it would be unwise to assume that Chinese will replace English as the most popular language on the internet in the forseeable future, unless the Chinese government is successful in its plans of world domination. :-) owth contained and localised behind the Great fireWall of China. *Again, thanks to their government's policy, there are more chinese who are learning English than foreigners who are learning Chinese. *While Chinese may be popular today as the language of economic growth and business opportunities; let us not forget that just several years earlier, Russian used to occupy a similar exalted pedestal. In coonclusion, it would be unwise to assume that Chinese will replace English as the most popular language on the internet in the forseeable future, unless the Chinese government is successful in its plans of world domination. :-) Edited by napoleon on 13 July 2011 at 5:11pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 121 13 July 2011 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Mandarin part of the internet may become just as big as the English one, measured in users and pages, but as long as the connections between them are as limited as they are it isn't something I have to care about. And if it some day turns out that I need to access that part of the internet, then I'll have to rely on translation machines and I just have to hope that they have improved in the meantime.
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| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5416 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 14 of 121 14 July 2011 at 4:20am | IP Logged | ||
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The discussion here is misguided because most people are approaching it with the misguided notion that it's "English vs Chinese", and that the day Chinese finally eclipses English on the Internet, it'll be something historically momentous.
In short, it won't. You won't even notice it. The Sinitic and Anglophone Internet spheres are completely isolated. Anglophone-oriented sites like YouTube/Facebook/Yahoo/etc will all continue to be massively populated by Anglophones and ESL participants. QQ/Sohu/Baidu/Yoku/etc have already attracted an audience equivalent to the entire population of North America (and growing), but most YouTube and Facebook users have never even heard of them, and I doubt they ever will. With regard to the discussion extrapolating Internet presence to the global lingua franca, it's obvious that English will remain preferred to Chinese in the Americas, Europe, and Australia. But Asia and Africa do not have any intrinsic linguistic reason to prefer English over Chinese, so when the Sinosphere finally does economically eclipse the Anglosphere, there's no reason to believe they won't tilt to Chinese. Edited by nway on 14 July 2011 at 4:23am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5416 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 15 of 121 14 July 2011 at 4:34am | IP Logged | ||
To compare China's economic ascendance to the anemic and structurally doomed Soviet Union and the tiny archipelago nation of Japan is ridiculously short-sighted. Chinese culture is not Russian culture (I'll leave the implications to you), and China demographically and geographically eclipses Japan just as the US demographically and geographically eclipses the UK. Critics need to dispose of that silly notion that every single person in China needs to be as rich as every single person in the West for China to maintain any influence. Newsflash: China is already the world's largest automobile market, and it will soon be the world's largest luxury market. 300,000,000 Chinese can be in famished poverty, and that will still leave 1,000,000,000 wealthy Chinese. As for the "level of prosperity that Europeans and North Americans enjoy", have you read the news lately? 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5999 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 16 of 121 15 July 2011 at 5:45am | IP Logged | ||
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The new inventions that the world lusts for start coming out of China is the day I'll
believe there is a remote possibility that Chinese might eventually "matter" (at least in the sense we are talking in this thread). Until then, just ask a random sampling of the population in China yourself: they will readily admit they are constantly just trying to copy everything. I personally knew a guy who worked at a government research center for nano technology. He explained he quit because they use very crude equipment about 100 times too poor to actually get consistent result, and they would repeat the same experiments as Americans for as many times as necessary until they achieve the same result (even if it is 1000 tries) just so they can just say that "they too have done it". There are also a lot of fake buildings. It's all about gaining face. It is all a charade. Smoke and mirrors. Why anyone would think this puts them on the fast track to becoming a SOURCE of utterly new novel ideas and things (which would give the original publishing language an upper- hand) is beyond me. Wait until there is an INKLING of proof that their culture is capable of this before speaking, please. (Or... perhaps the present culture isn't capable, but it will change into something that is -- in which case, wait until we have evidence of that. Cause I don't believe there is an iota as of present.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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