[davidw]

> probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker

I very clearly remember my first time in Italy, when I saw a family at a restaurant and realized their 5/6 year old spoke much better Italian than I did. Kind of humbling.

[roel_v]

But the average 3-year old Chinese speaks infinite better Chinese than I do (I can't even pronounce 'ni hao' correctly I'm sure, despite my colleagues kind praise of how I say it very understandably); I don't see how that's humbling. Language knowledge is imo rather useless; languages is a very inefficient idea transfer mechanism, and the amount of energy we collectively waste on translations and learning languages is staggering. I see languages as an unfortunate side-effect of human's poor natural communication traits, and I hope that we can do away with most of them asap.

[kmm]

I don't think I understand. How would we communicate without language?

[roel_v]

That would be rather hard, even if we had neural interfaces - I hope to do away with most languages so that we have only a few (ideally one) left, and hopefully those wouldn't be too dissimilar either.

I'll admit though that that point was rather tangential to the post I was replying to.