i can speak the language just enough to get by but once you get into technical terms, i'm once again completely lost. Unless they do a Singapore or Dubai and make business in English, i dont see any chance of them attracting talent
I have openly stated that it is a strictly less technical language and often draws teams in to vague specifications and much more verbose language to find specificity. I have billions of dollars in progress to back that up.
There is a lot about Chinese and American culture that will surprise you when the rubber meets the road.
So how is the language "strictly less technical and specific"? Can you give specific and technical examples?
Rote Surgery is not a good example compared to say writing a PRD about an unknown feature.
I am in no way saying Chinese people cannot do these things. I am saying in mandarin it is less specific and more circumspect ways of getting there.
I’m guessing you don’t really know what your talking about here though and are knee jerking a response.
I'm not sure why you're getting so defensive; I indeed don't speak Chinese, hence why I'm asking a question.
A claim like "Chinese as a language is less technical and specific than English and slows progress" seems pretty grand; and if Chinese people failed to launch satellites in orbit or do brain surgery you could point to that; but they don't seem to be held back by their language when it comes to making specific, technical achievements, so I'm curious to hear actual, concrete details or examples about what makes Chinese a "less technical and specific" language.
It sounds like your answer is "it simply just is, because it's a courtly language" - which is not a very satisfying answer, intellectually speaking.
English has 26 characters you can put in a buttoned keyboard. You recurse upon these letters to create new words & meanings. Chinese has what, a thousand? And you'd have to create a stroke system first if you don't have hanyu pinyin. Recursing Chinese characters has problems too, the chinese word for 'good', when split to it's sub-characters represent different meanings.
There were also some Chinese historians that specifically pointed out the chinese language was part of the cause of their worst slices of history despite the chinese having invented gunpowder and whatnot first. They also noted chinese was confined to the elite, who made the language even more complex (in contrast to other civilizations), during certain dynastic periods. Today, the chinese government are trying to simplify the language.
I get that there is pride in people's native languages, but they'll repeat the same mistakes if they don't recognize the weaknesses. It's a bitter pill to swallow.
Was that Chinese text actually being ambiguous, or was that translations you were given being borderline nonsensical/error-prone? The latter is kind of an expected behavior, and that has nothing to do with whether Chinese are illogical bunches(why even bother if so...)
Chinese textbooks for University quantum physics are written in Chinese. They don't like, switch to English after high school or something. And they do in fact do brain surgeries and fly manned rockets. The language is obviously fine as it is.
The likely core of the problem you had encountered is that, languages are algorithms of thoughts, contrary to whatever Chomsky guy might have told you, and a language is only coherent within itself, and you weren't aware of that. A piece of Chinese text taken out of context and words displaced with that English used in similar manners, don't necessarily make sense. Rest assured you'd be far from alone with conflating lack of coherency of someone not from US trying to speak English with their lack of IQ, that's a common sight, but that doesn't mean a language you don't speak is inferior to yours.
Chinese is different, more contextual and metaphorical, requiring more 'fuzzy' linguistics to say the same thing.
Thats its... thats all. And I challenge anyone who works across china and US like I do to not agree. Beyond that you're just going off on your own made up missions of stupidity. Really re-read your train of thought and think about how wandering nonsense it becomes with assumed things I didn't say.
Language specificity and cultural encoding in those languages can have a pretty major impact on its clarity, especially in critical situation. Speaking a secondary language instead can avoid that sort of thing simply because being a non-native speaker, you'll be a good deal more blunt in that language.
English is the language of aviation because in 1951 the countries with the most living pilots and aircraft spoke English. It is not because of any trait particular to English.
There are few recordings of aircraft emergencies over Japan on YouTube. Two obvious things in those recordings are that local pilots drop pretense of speaking Engurish in almost any non-normal conditions, and that local ATCs are dangerously useless outside of normal conditions. There's nothing visibly helpful from using English in there.
My favourite example is Arabic, which is both an old and hard to extend language.
In Arabic you would have a hard time to express the concept of „a foreigner who is citizen but resides out of state“.
Not that we often speak about this concept in English, but the word used to refer to „citizens“ carries the connotation of „nation“ and the alternative word used for „inhabitants“ carries the connotation of being on site.
Speaking of a Yemeni citizen and than meeting an Asian person, would surprise people even if they new that the person they were meeting was named „Ho“.
Loan words do not easily slide into this. New words are less easily made up than e.g. in German, where you can just concatenate.
Lots of words have been around for a long time, since quranic Arabic influences the language still, and as a result have layers of meaning.
The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.
In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.
Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.
> Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language.
It is much easier for me, as a Canadian, to move to basically any European country and learn the language there than to move to China. I would also earn more money than in China. This is true for much of the world.
Chinese is a better language to learn initially but that's like APL being better than ALGOL. Most of the world doesn't want to learn "{⍵[⍋⍵]}X" to sort an array "X". The network effects are key.
I'm still learning Chinese because it is obvious that with the demographic crunch there will be heavy incentives to migrate in the near future. I also have to work with Chinese suppliers and colleagues on a regular basis; it is rapidly growing in %age of workforce.
But I'd have to earn American salaries to move there, because otherwise I would just move to the USA and speak English, a language I already know and can be highly productive in.
China is terrible at diversity. They don't look like it because they don't have a history of foreign colonialism or slavery like the West. It's not based on greed/hate. But look at how they treat indigenous minorities (Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols). Banning minority language instruction, banning religious texts, mass surveillance, etc. They have a very hard time even integrating their own rural Han population (hukou system)!
In the CCP's worldview, diversity is not a strength. Historically to them, diversity=fragmentation=weakness (Warlord Era, Century of Humiliation). In contrast, Unity+Homogeneity is real strength. They want everyone moving to the exact same beat.
In much of America and Europe especially the large cities you can become a citizen, because that's a legal construct. In China you'll never become Chinese. Look at how Africans were targeted in Guangzhou during the early stages of Covid, regardless of visa status. Evicted from apartments/hotels/restaurants, etc.
They have the hardest permanent residency system in the world. Between 2004 and 2013, they issued only ~7000 green cards total (the US issuing ~1M per year!)
>>> CCP's worldview, diversity is not a strength
These two sentences are contradicting each other.
They don't do naturalisation of foreigners, that's true. You can only give that to your children.
I seem to recall that is a problem with Switzerland too; people can be refused citizenship by bureaucracy at the local level. Yet people still flock there (perhaps because of the money).
Tech people need to reduce complexity to make it computable, that's our job. Our strong points are the weak points too. Again: no blame or shame. Just wanted to point out we are susceptible in these matters.
I would think for most people, you care about whether you can fit economically before you consider something that is unlikely to matter.
Obviously don't go and try to immigrate to China if you are planning to be a political commentator.
But for most people in most places, what will you notice? Are there jobs, how is tax, are the streets clean, are there homeless people, can I see a doctor, is there a lot of paperwork? Will I find friends?
This creates real difficulties in daily life. Today, almost all routine activities—online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing—are conducted through smartphone apps. If you can’t read Chinese, even basic tasks become complicated. In recent years, the number of foreigners living in China has declined compared to a decade ago. While political and economic factors clearly play a role, I suspect that the language barrier has also become a more significant obstacle.
Many Chinese people, especially younger generations, can speak some basic English, since it is a mandatory subject in school. As a result, interpersonal communication is usually manageable, and traveling in China is relatively easy. However, living there long-term is a very different experience from visiting as a tourist.
Whenever I get lunch or dinner north of Toronto with colleagues, the restaurant has no English signage. But because the Chinese restaurants have no waiter and all orders are through a website I can translate the ordering interface on my phone.
> online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing
Surely pre-smartphone, all the offline equivalents of these were also Chinese-language only? Especially in that era, effectively no taxi drivers or shop assistants would've known English, and you didn't have a phone to translate for you.
Oh, just like English!
/s sorry I'm only half-joking but written English makes no sense
But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quite a grind.
I was driven to the store, so I drove to the store. The store drove me there.
My passenger was driven to the store so he asked me to drive him to the store. So since the store was driving us to the store, I drove us to the store. We've become good friends since he was driven to the store. I'm glad the store drove us to the store.
Even though I usually prefer to drive cattle.
They put more emphasis on the meaning of the word than reading itself. As opposed to French where you know how to read it instantly–but you don't necessarily understand it.
In English, I realized that there are words I mispronounced/misread my entire life before hearing a native person say it outloud. That's because I only ever encountered the word in its written form.
Or they write words incorrectly because it doesn't even closely match the pronunciation.
I never said English was a superbly designed language, just that it does make sense when you look at the entire history and etymology. But yeah, it's a heavily-kludged mess, though it is pretty good at being accessible for new learners just because it's flexible and has a relatively simple grammar.
So identical to French then!
Considering that there are a billion+ people capable of speaking chinese, with many million of them not speaking it natively, your generalisation might instead be a rather specific, individual problem.
> Chinese is too difficult of a language.
> I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
> Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English.
Do I wish I spoke English natively? Not really, but these anecdotals are... interesting.
Nobody has any delusional ideas about it- xenophobia is a luxury the country cannot afford.
I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.
Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.
Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.
Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.
Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.
You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.
Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.
Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.