The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin

Re:The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin by perl4ever on Sunday July 26, 2020 @01:33PM (#23958622)

>You can consistently memorize a phone number in mandarin, but you can't in english because the syllables are too long

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.

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Re:The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin by _4jlx on Sunday July 26, 2020 @03:31PM (#23959526)

This is also from a study. The gist is that english single-digit numbers take longer to say/think than mandarin single-digit numbers (1/3 second vs 1/4 second), and so 9 digits in english be slightly too long to be consistently memorizable for most people.

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.

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Re:The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin by perl4ever on Sunday July 26, 2020 @05:49PM (#23960450)

>1/3 second vs 1/4 second

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.

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Re:The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin by bobbyz on Monday July 27, 2020 @11:55AM (#23966312)

As a speaker of both languages, when I say the numbers aloud or in my mind the difference is obvious.

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Re:The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin by nix23 on Sunday July 26, 2020 @04:11PM (#23959823)

>The gist is that English single-digit numbers take longer to say/think than mandarin

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.

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Re:The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin by bobbyz on Sunday July 26, 2020 @04:34PM (#23959982)

You're thinking about it from purely a programmer's perspective. Imagine the world switches to "bobish" tomorrow, which is 20% more efficient than english.

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.

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Re:The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin by nix23 on Sunday July 26, 2020 @05:15PM (#23960246)

>You're thinking about it from purely a programmer's perspective

>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.

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Re:The internet is multilingual but you need to learn Mandarin by bobbyz on Monday July 27, 2020 @12:08PM (#23966425)

Why is compression bad in natural language? From reading those vitamin water labels it's clear to me that English still has room to shrink before we experience a substantial hit to readability. 'You' to 'u', 'what' to 'wat', 'phone' to 'fone', etc.

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