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Wikipedia and language choice

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
55 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7  Next >>
Captain Haddock
Diglot
Senior Member
Japan
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Joined 6779 days ago
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Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek

 
 Message 17 of 55
30 September 2006 at 10:31am | IP Logged 
Quote:
A businessperson can make money in the US selling products and services to Spanish-speaking people.


Not to mention those other 400 million or so Spanish speakers around the world!

Quote:
Does this really matter if you just want to read articles from them to practice your reading?


If you're just using Wikipedia for practice, that top-ten list hardly matters. I mean, are you really going to work your way through all 11,000 Icelandic articles or 38,000 entries in Romanian, and then say, "gosh, I knew I should have chosen Swedish instead"?
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Darobat
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7199 days ago
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Speaks: English*, Russian
Studies: Latin

 
 Message 18 of 55
30 September 2006 at 11:15am | IP Logged 
Captain Haddock wrote:
If you're just using Wikipedia for practice, that top-ten list hardly matters. I mean, are you really going to work your way through all 11,000 Icelandic articles or 38,000 entries in Romanian, and then say, "gosh, I knew I should have chosen Swedish instead"?
Perhaps not, but with so few articles, there's a better chance that you'd end up saying "gosh, I wish the Icelandic Wikipedia had an article on potatoes!" It may have a decent number of articles, but there's no guarentee they're on topics of interest to you.
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Transvaal
Newbie
United States
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Speaks: English*

 
 Message 19 of 55
30 September 2006 at 11:37am | IP Logged 
AML wrote:

A good friend of mine, who is non-Hispanic, speaks Spanish fluently. He
is also a lawyer. As a result of this, he now works for a high profile US
bank and often uses his Spanish to speak with rich Central and South
American clients that invest much of their money through this bank. His
ability to speak Spanish was a critical factor in his hire, and they even
interviewed him partly in Spanish to test his abilities.

Now, back on topic. . .


Sounds like he’s in private wealth management (basically Edward Jones for people with minimum assets of 5 million or so). I don’t really understand what bank he works for… never heard of Hispanics coming to the USA to have their assets assessed with a Spanish-speaking lawyer. I’m sure Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank etc have offices in Latin America to conduct business in global wealth management. I’ve heard of banks flying bankers down to Latin America who speak Spanish but never the other way around (Hispanics being flown to the USA to have meetings in Spanish)… but there isn’t much business going around in Latin America, maybe Brazil and Argentina but that’s about it.

But anyway, you’re not going to make money printing Spanish labels on stuff, English is the global business language and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. There are huge corporations throughout Asia, Europe & Africa that solely conduct their business in English, I could go work in Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany etc and never speak a word of anything but English, that’s globalization for you.

Captain Haddock wrote:

Not to mention those other 400 million or so Spanish speakers around the world!


If it were 400 million Spanish-speaking people with a huge middle class then I would understand but this is simply not the case.

As for getting back on topic… I really don’t like how languages with 10 million speakers (Swedish) have more articles than languages like Russian, Spanish etc (but that’s bots for you).

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alexptrans
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Israel
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Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew, Russian*, French, Arabic (Written)
Studies: Icelandic

 
 Message 20 of 55
30 September 2006 at 12:52pm | IP Logged 
Excuse my ignorance, but what is a Wikipedia bot?
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AML
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6836 days ago
323 posts - 426 votes 
2 sounds
Speaks: English*
Studies: Modern Hebrew, German, Spanish

 
 Message 21 of 55
30 September 2006 at 2:58pm | IP Logged 
[QUOTE=alexptrans] Excuse my ignorance, but what is a Wikipedia bot?[/
QUOTE]

bot
look it up on Wikipedia!
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alexptrans
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Israel
Joined 6776 days ago
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Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew, Russian*, French, Arabic (Written)
Studies: Icelandic

 
 Message 22 of 55
30 September 2006 at 3:08pm | IP Logged 
Thanks. So how can a bot write its own articles? That's the part I don't really get.
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Andy_Liu
Triglot
Senior Member
Hong Kong
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Speaks: Mandarin, Cantonese*, EnglishC2
Studies: French

 
 Message 23 of 55
30 September 2006 at 7:46pm | IP Logged 
I remember that in Russian wikipedia, some editors (most probably human users) finished a bulk of astronomy articles in a short time in summer. That was successful because there's a lot of relevant information from the public domain sources in Russia. You would know, Russia has a good space industry. Chinese/Slovakian/Esperanto wikipedias then follow suit, for example, but their information base is just too small compared to the bigger wikipedias.
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Hackseng
Newbie
Canada
Joined 6935 days ago
15 posts - 16 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Korean, French

 
 Message 24 of 55
30 September 2006 at 9:40pm | IP Logged 
One thing to remember is that Wikipedia isn't an indicator of the prevalence of online language usage. If Wikipedia is used as a reason for choosing a language to learn based on the number of articles, then one must remember not all countries widely use Wikipedia.

I don't know where the number of Korean speakers on the internet ranks now (due to internet access skyrocketing in developing countries), but a few years ago it was around 5th or 6th. Probably closer to around 10th now. At any rate, if you're a student of the Korean language, Wikipedia as a learning resource is not even on the radar. A Korean-language learner can go to sites like Daum or Naver, which are essentially a Korean "Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, MSN, and more" all in one. Basically, Korean internet users are in a world of their own, and this world does not include Wikipedia.


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