I came across this post today as I was searching for Chinese programmer communities + specifically, Mandarin technical / business terms that are specific to the programming space.

Although I am English fluent, + learned English at a very young age, I grew up in a household watching my parents struggle with the language. It’s easy for people who only speak English to say, “Everyone should learn English!” but really? come on, a) China is 1/3 of the world’s population b) it’s as difficult for someone to learn English well as to learn any other language well c) the desire for everyone to be a bit more open minded and willing to learn another’s language provide infinite opportunities.

A lot of people I know write English beautifully but don’t speak it well. I am this way with French (minus the beautiful part ). There is an inherent fear in speaking a language, screwing up, and feel like you might be wasting someone else’s time with the slowness of the pace.

Anyway, I got a bit off track there but super glad to have discovered your post. If you can refer me to any Mandarin/Shanghai-ese/or Cantonese programming groups, web pages, resources, etc. I’d love to know about it. I for one, would love to learn our lingo in a new language!

Thanks again!

M

I’ve had the privilege of travelling widely for work. I’ve given talks in Finland, Holland, Germany, Spain, and China. I always slow down my speaking speed and leave behind slides with too many words on them by “modern US presentation standards.” Despite the brilliant level of English I’ve encountered, it’s a Bell curve in every group. Some are fluent (or “fluent” in their own minds), others less so. Side discussions in any of these countries that drop into their native tongue to quickly explain something I’ve said always reduce the signal:noise ratio and improve throughput in the comms channel over people trying to be too polite and stay with me in English. And that’s the point in the end, it’s an exchange of ideas and not a unidirectional blast of “perfect” information.

Lastly there seems to be an assumption here from the pure English speakers that English is English. It’s not. I grew up in Canada, a country wedged between a massive American neighbour to the south and a terribly British upbringing. (My apologies for cultural-bias to my Québecqois cousins.) Canadian English is already a mashup of American and British English. (As the old joke goes, in one “bugger” is a noun but in the other it’s a verb.) I worked for an India Dev Centre for two years. Indian English is a further strain again. My friends from Australia talk funny. Once you get into any sort of nuanced discussion, you still find yourself needing to slow down and ask for clarification. English is not One-True-Language.

cheers,

I’m planning on maybe moving to either Shanghai or Suzhou in a few month and would be interested in knowing that… Also if you can give me your email address, it would be nice to chat with someone who has experience working there as a software developper and when I finally come there I can invite you to some beer and huoguo (I lived in Shanghai for 6 months 4 years ago but none of my friends there are really in the software business…)

On the topic, while I think it’s important for programmers to learn to communicate in english (by writing is enough) to get access to the wealth of new information, I also completely agree that it makes sense to have resources in one’s own language…. For most people who haven’t lived in a english country for a long enough time so that english has not become completely natural for them, learning in their own language will remove the cognitive barriers of mentally translating the content while learning. As an example, I’ve lived in Japan for 3 years and an half and while I understand Japanese well enough to work I know that when it comes to learning new materials, I learn much faster in French or English than I would in Japanese.

I sometimes have a feeling that a lot of American companies are blinded by the fact that a lot of people can read and write English. They tend to think that building a global community in english is enough and there is no need to localize it to other languages but what most of them fail to realize is that a lot of people who can communicate in English have to make a mental effort that wouldn’t be present in their own language.
Of course, there is the issue of the cost of localization and so it might not actually make sense to localize your product. But I have the feeling that thy discard the idea of localizing too quickly and are surprised when a cloned localized version of their website springs up.

Sorry for the rambling answer…

PRC simplified Chinese often only needs one character where a whole word would be needed in English, hence you could leave out whitespace, just like in their writing. And because it can be read at the same font size as English, you could get much shorter programs – very useful if you can see everything in one screenful.

As for the different-ways-of-coding-problems result of the grammar-being-different property of Chinese, that would cause syntactic-level-only differences.

The overwhelming majority of people in China (like 85%) were already speaking standard Mandarin (putonghua) or something close to it before it was made the national standard. So the PRC didn’t have to try very hard.

Testing here: italic? bold?

Thank you, thank you thank you.

This concept is absolutely pivotal to a huge amount of what constitutes “debate” on the web. I’d never seen it articulated before. There is waaaaay too much “thinkism” and not enough “isism” out there.

I’m a big fan of isism.