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Re:The Tron Project: How Japan Almost Ruled IT by numpad0 on Sunday October 01, 2023 @09:22AM (#37725699)
It's never fine to read English docs and send PR for Japanese engineers. You're probably familiar with Japanese audiences on the Web with a strong, how should I call it, a very unnatural grammatical "accent" almost as heavy as a stereotypical Indian accent but in literal form.

That "accent" is due to our standard English teaching method that builds up an on-the-fly bidirectional translation layer on top of pure Japanese internal monologue. We're trained all the way from middle schools to college/University to do this complex rule-based word transposition and word-for-word substitution technique and that is unnatural as anything and slow as, like real QEMU. This is also why many dumb-faced Japanese people with some English skills are rather quick to issue and respond to fewer-words commands with highly technical expressions("don't lubricate [that] receptacle") but are far slower at returning verbal responses with higher word counts("I'm already 5 minutes into the future from the point I was to be there"), because they're doing it and it's not just a complex multi-parallel but also kind of an exponential time process.

I'm done with that method for better or worse, and I suspect my "tone" in literal English should not even be convincingly Japanese. But it's still way harder to do English, and for the vast majority of us who aren't demonstrably English speaking, it's just their precise translation skills coming with massive overhead.

Re:The Tron Project: How Japan Almost Ruled IT by WBrentWilliams on Sunday October 01, 2023 @10:05AM (#37726063)
Your explanation of a bidirectional translation layer analogs a lot to where I am in my study of Japanese. Three years in, there are quite a lot of kanji where I see it and think the English word; the Japanese pronunciation takes a noticeable amount of processing time to surface. My word count is fairly low (maybe 500 - 1000 words) and my grammar is on-par with a three-year-old. However, I'm getting better. Not bad, I suppose, for someone who started study at the age of 46 and only devotes about an hour a day to the task.