[izacus]

Look, good for you if you refuse to learn the language of your society.... As long as you don't attempt to write opinion pieces about that society you have no hope of integrating or understanding.

That's what the article writer did.

[saiya-jin]

Nobody said outright refusing, I specifically mentioned even with few hundreds of words you can get by in many societies (probably not Japan or ie China though). Its about priorities, one has very little free time and for some there are more important matters than talking a bit better to strangers. Many languages require multi-year frequent commitment, you can learn tons of other skills or sports instead.

You can certainly write opinions, that's what they are, internet is still mostly free for speech. Not sure why you feel as an authority on who can write what. Something about high horse again? Living somewhere you can get tons of positives and negatives of state, society etc. even if not understanding a word. Maybe not 100% picture, but enough to form an opinion and write about it

[notch656c]

My country has no official language and the lingua franca of my neighborhood is not a language I speak. Shit just got weird because basically no one would not consider me part of this society and I sure as hell understand it roughly as well as anybody else in my hood.

Maybe America is just weird but you can come here and not learn English and if someone refuses your right to comment on our society they'll probably just be called a straight up racist.

[izacus]

Your country isn't the whole rest of the world. I thought that would be obvious for an average HNer?

[notch656c]

I would think one would look at the original quote and see it says:

"私は日本語がかなり下手です" [0]

Not being good at something is not the same thing as having refused to learn it. From the authors response I honestly can't assess their level of Japanese well. I routinely have had people tell me they don't speak English well but then have a full conversation with them.

https://twitter.com/wingcommander1/status/161706014073333760...