[noch]

> They live full lives, and I couldn't care less about their German levels. They do enough good things with their time they put their energy into instead.

What an odd mindset. Anecdotally, prior generations of Europeans (and expatriates) valued being multilingual. Having a working knowledge of German, Italian, French, English was fun, valuable, and normal especially when doing business in diverse countries and with diverse peoples.

That generation even taught us that "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." I guess that principle is no longer a thing.

[petodo]

> Having a working knowledge of German, Italian, French, English was fun, valuable, and normal especially when doing business in diverse countries and with diverse peoples.

That's nice with all these very similar languages using latin alphabet and now try it with Chinese characters and tones in China or at least kanji/hiragana without tones in Japan. Characters are huge barrier when learning the language, because you don't see words to memorize everywhere you look, you see just bunch of strokes. I really wish Chinese switched completely to pinyin as Vietnamese did (and Chinese intended, but didn't finish), it would remove huge barrier in communication (and also tehcnologically wise, after all most of the Chinese already write pinyin anyway on smartphones/computers, which just transcribe their pinyin back to characters) and people would realize Chinese is actually very simple language, where you don't have tenses, plural, etc.

As someone speaking English/German and my other two mother languages I can still understand some Italian, French or Dutch (which is basically English mixed with German by drunk sailor), because of how similar these languages are, so picking up some of them would be very easy compared to Chinese/Japanese (well at least Japanese has much more loaned words from English than Chinese).

[amrocha]

Do you actually speak Chinese or Japanese? Because either of those languages with phonetic characters would be a nightmare imo.

The characters actually make it easier to learn the language imo, and anyone who claims otherwise hasn't actually tried to learn seriously

[skhr0680]

Vietnam and Korea have mostly dispensed with Chinese characters and are doing fine

[tsukikage]

Strangely enough, the official languages there are Vietnamese and Korean respectively, not Chinese or Japanese.

[eloisant]

I don't know about Vietnamese but you can really make a parallel between Korean and Japanese.

Korean was using kanji the same way Japanese are using them now, and Japan could totally switch to hiragana only like Korea went for hangul. I've had some Japanese friends who were advocated for hiragana only, and were writing (on Twitter or blog posts) in hiragana only.

Yes, once you know kanji it's easier to read that full hiragana, but there is a point to be made about how learning kanji is difficult. Not just for foreigners, but also for Japanese students from first grade to high school.

[soraminazuki]

Retro Japanese games displayed text in all katakana because of technical limitations. But it didn't stick, for good reasons. It's incredibly hard to read. Like, imagine reading an ASCII text in hexadecimal representation. That's how it feels when reading a sufficiently long text in all hiragana or katakana.

Abolishing kanjis might've worked for the Korean language, but Korean isn't Japanese. They're entirely different languages. Funnily though, that's something that the Unicode Consortium also needs a reminder on [1].

> Not just for foreigners, but also for Japanese students from first grade to high school.

This is an exaggeration. Native Japanese speakers in middle school would have no problem reading common kanjis in real life. A high schooler would be able to read as well as a grownup.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

[thablackbull]

> I really wish Chinese switched completely to pinyin

Perhaps Americans would take the first step and switch from imperial to metric, then we can discuss and tell everyone what to do.

[petodo]

Yes, they should, but not sure how is it relevant to what I WISHED for, I didn't tell anyone what to do and I'm clearly not an American.

[HKH2]

> I really wish Chinese switched completely to pinyin

That's like wishing English would switch to IPA because English spelling is wildly inconsistent - which English would you choose? People who speak different dialects can still understand each other using written Chinese, whereas Pinyin is for Mandarin only.

[petodo]

almost everyone using smartphones and computers already use pinyin anyway when they are inputting Chinese characters, it's just redundant at this point, part of tradition without practical meaning

[HKH2]

> almost everyone using smartphones and computers already use pinyin anyway when they are inputting Chinese characters

Cantonese speakers don't use Pinyin.

[epups]

Prior generations of Europeans were also xenophobic as hell, to the point of going to war with each other. I really don't understand which idyllic past you refer to here.

[ajsnigrutin]

Everybody has gone to war with eachother in every continent all the way through history.

If you go live in a country (long-term, which 10 years is), you should learn the language and not expect the locals to try to conform to your not-knowing the language... you're there, it's their country, their language, not vice-versa. How can you expect a country where people employed there don't know the local language to even work? Imagine a postman, a service worker, etc. not knowing german.. how is that going to work? When stuff like this happens, you get immiggrant ghettos and yes, in turn xenophobia, because people there cannot get normal jobs and expect the germans to adapt to them instead of vice-versa.

[epups]

If I live in the country for 10 years, then it is my country too. Perhaps it is in my interest to learn the language, and perhaps it isn't. There are plenty of countries in the world where people get by perfectly fine without even having a unifying language.

Do you guys know how every language came to be? It was through the interaction of people from different cultures, and it is an ongoing process. Germany was not even a country not so long ago. I reject the normative notion that learning a language is central to being a positive member of a community.

[rayiner]

> If I live in the country for 10 years, then it is my country too

Lol no. You’re not a sovereign individual. You’re part of a society, and every society is the product of people who have a culture that’s been cultivated over generations. Japan is a creation of the Japanese—the fruit of generations of Japanese people building a society according to their culture—not some foreigner who’s lived there for a fraction of a lifetime.

[epups]

Japan is not a a lone entity as well. It exists in a concert of nations. It buys and sells products from elsewhere. If you showed how modern Tokyo looks like to a Japanese from only 100 years ago, they would have a breakdown. Meanwhile, to the average Westerner, Tokyo is perfectly understandable, although of course unique.

Let's just take one example. John von Neumann - a gasp immigrant - may have more to do with how America looks like today than anybody alive in the 1800s. Should America make some silly rule like you propose, and say that people like him are not welcome there, or that America does not "belong" to them? I suppose you support giving back the land to indigenous tribes then?

[wellanyway]

You are not seriously comparing yourself to Neumann, are you?

[rayiner]

> John von Neumann - a gasp immigrant - may have more to do with how America looks like today than anybody alive in the 1800s

Not at all. Bangladesh, where I’m from, has computers too, but its government, institutions, infrastructure, constitution, etc., are still what Bangladeshis and the British created. Society is a product of culture, and culture runs deep and is extremely sticky.

[astrange]

Strong statement about a country that completely reinvented itself in 1868 (largely by copying the West) and then was forcefully reinvented (again by the West) in 1947.

[ajsnigrutin]

Yeah, sure, you're able to get by without learning anything in some places... but you are a foreigner who came to their country, and instead of you adapting to the local culture (..well language), you expect literally everyone around you to adapt to your culture (..language) and use a non-native language to interact with you.

Imagine a brit going to france, driving his car on the "wrong" side of the road and saying "it doesn't matter, people just drive around me, it's not an issue".

[cc81]

As you age and require more and more services from the state of those countries do you think that country should provide you with an interpreter? You might encounter government employees, healthcare professionals or elderly care that does not speak English.

[izacus]

And the new generations will increasingly become xenophobic again as arrogant foreginers with no will to learn local language move in.

It's a massive trend in Europe again and it will not end well for the expats.

[epups]

Yes and then maybe expats will go contribute their skills elsewhere, in a clear loss to the arrogant locals who think speaking language X is more important than living peacefully and contributing to the social welfare that depends on a young workforce that Europe can no longer produce.

[apelapan]

It will be a three-way loss. For the natives who lose out on services, for the expats who clearly actively chose being expats in a particular location over all other options available to them and finally for the natives where the expats relocate who have to suffer those assholes (in exchange for services).

[michaelscott]

Prior generations were more likely to remain in a specific geographical area (eg. central or western Europe) and so taking the time to learn these specific languages made sense. Learning other European languages as a European is also not that far of a leap (unless we're talking Hungarian or Finnish).

Modern generations are constantly on the move in a globalised world. It's not uncommon for that European to end up working in Asia nowadays, where their knowledge of other European languages is useless.

[lynx23]

It is still a thing, however, not for hardcore leftists. They will be very fast in calling you a nazi or at least faschist if you utter sentences like that. I am guessing they dont want to see their utopia fail, so they ignore everything which would be evidence against their view of the world.

And its fucking sad, because I used to see myself as part of "them". However, this inability to reflect about ones own failings has totally alienated me.