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Wikipedia and language choice | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| makaveli1989 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6754 days ago 69 posts - 73 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 41 of 55 07 December 2006 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wikipedia should not be used to decide weather to learn a language or not.
The reason is no simpler than just because Wiki is popular in the English speaking countries does not mean it has the same popularity in other countries. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| RogueRook Diglot Senior Member Germany N/A Joined 6843 days ago 174 posts - 177 votes 6 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Hungarian, Turkish | Message 42 of 55 07 December 2006 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wikipedia seems to be decaying as of late. Recently I came across two articles in close succesion that had been vandalized, containing witticisms about SpongeBob.
It seems the bigger the project becomes the more inevitable its final collapse will be. Who is going to maintain and patrol the 1,500,000 English articles alone, not to mention the rest? So to sum it up, it is ludicrous to base ones language choice on such an experiment as Wikipedia no doubt is. Edited by RogueRook on 07 December 2006 at 3:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6676 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 43 of 55 07 December 2006 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
First of all, I feel offended by this patronizing tone of yours. And yes, you already explained your weird conception of ethnicity.
Prejudices are prejudices whether they are positive or negative. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| RogueRook Diglot Senior Member Germany N/A Joined 6843 days ago 174 posts - 177 votes 6 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Hungarian, Turkish | Message 44 of 55 07 December 2006 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Self-victimization is en vogue these days I see... C'mon Marc. What are you, man or mouse? How can you feel insulted by what a stranger writes about you on an internet forum. Heck, this ain't real life... This place has no bearing on your self-esteem and nothing I write or say should make you feel patronized. How do you cope with real life if a snide comment makes you whine?
Granted. But prejudices have their merits too. Only those who aren't ready to adjust their prejudices after they know better are the real culprits. One final note before trying to get this thread back OT: The word "racist" is the single most overused term in the English language. You grossly misapplied it when you said Alijsh made a racist claim. This guy is a Persian and he takes pride in his people. Can you blame him for that? He belongs to an Aryan people tracing its roots back thousands of years. And Persians are well aware of their great history. That's not racism Then he paid the Jews a compliment. Since when is saying something nice about Jews racism? This is what my snappy retort was about. You only talk about superficialities like tone and feeling patronized. That's not what I talk about. Edited by RogueRook on 07 December 2006 at 5:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6901 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 45 of 55 07 December 2006 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Let's all keep away from racism/ethnicity/politics discussions as we all know where *those* threads end up. ;)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| RogueRook Diglot Senior Member Germany N/A Joined 6843 days ago 174 posts - 177 votes 6 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Hungarian, Turkish | Message 46 of 55 07 December 2006 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Agreed lady_skywalker. But I won't just watch and let it pass uncommented when someone misuses these terms. My love of peace and harmony don't go beyond my love of frankness and being upfront when something irritates me.
Politics by the way was never part of the equation. Nobody is talking politics here. It is just a given that there will be discussions and disagreements on an internet forum once in a while. Of course this musn't ecalate into profanity and foul language and on my part never will Those who cherish pure and unadulterated friendliness and harmony should try Teletubbies for a change. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6593 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 47 of 55 08 December 2006 at 6:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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So Wikipedia isn't a good indicator of the merits of learning a language. What is, then? Assuming the starter of this thread wanted some sort of ranking for how "useful" a language is, how would the languages be graded? I'm guessing we'll have to go worldwide here, since Spanish is undoubtedly more useful for an American than, say, a Swede.
So here's a thought. How would the languages be rated if we grade them on a scale of communication potential? The idea here is simply to be able to communicate with the largest number of people possible. Like the Wikipedia scale, this will favour countries with many speakers (it is undoubtedly more useful to learn English than Swedish, for example), but in contrast, this scale would favour languages with less globalized and rich citizens. German would be rated pretty low, since most Germans speak English, so learning German would not increase the number of people you can communicate with very much, if you already know English. Spanish and Chinese would be very useful, however. I don't know how the English is in India, seeing as it's an old colony, so I don't know if Hindi would be considered a useful language here. French will probably get you pretty far in a lot of countries. I'm not well versed in the spread of languages, so I don't really have much to go on here. Arabic? Portugese? Russian? I haven't a clue what the list would look like. Naturally, mutual intelligibility will have to be taken into account. If you can communicate with Slovaks by learning Russian, those who only speak Slovak would count as points for Russian (or maybe as half-points?). Just a thought-experiment on my part, take it for what it is. It's not a method that I'm suggesting everyone should start using, nor is it a scale of which languages are "better" than others. So don't start defending the merits of learning the German language here (unless it's about how lots of people speak German but not English). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6779 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 48 of 55 08 December 2006 at 6:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
This sort of statement its rather subjective, because you have to account for the level of proficiency you're considering. If you just want to communicate at a simple tourist level, sure, many Germans can probably manage that in English. If you want to have deep conversations on complicated subjects with those same people, you'll probably have to learn German. Anyway, no matter what language you learn, you're not going to run out of people to communicate with. A list of "most useful languages" will be highly tailored to each individual language learner based on his own goals and criteria. Edited by Captain Haddock on 08 December 2006 at 6:30am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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