How are you going to do any kind of business with Chinese companies without speaking Chinese? Even if you use an interpreter, clearly someone in the loop is speaking Chinese.
If there are any business to do in China in the next 10-20 years. Foreign investment in China is down 90% this year. Again, international travel in China is down 97% this year. Apparently everyone else except hacker news readers are aware of the shift.
Such hyperbole. If you seriously think there will be no foreign business activity in China in twenty years let’s bet real cash on that.
It is true that China like most countries at some point is experiencing a crisis at the moment.
As an aside, I think Xi needs to go. Deng Xiaoping’s strategy was better imho. The semi-planned economy approach has worked surprisingly well for now but it’s clear it’s running out of steam. China has already suffered greatly due to such a strategy before.
I can't cite numbers but I don't think it's hyperbole. A friend of mine recently did her Master's thesis on the effects of Covid on international business in Guangzhou. She interviewed a number of business owners and the consensus was basically that a lot of businesses that shut down because of Covid don't seem to be coming back, with most seeming worried about Taiwan.
But still, there was one business owner arguing that there's never been a better time to do business with China because it's cheaper right now, so who knows what will actually happen.
The CCP leadership doesn't care what you think. Xi seems fairly healthy. He could be in power for decades to come. We need to plan around the expectation of a new Cold War with China and declining foreign trade.
I doubt I can train myself to do better than ChatGPT can, this late in the game. When I last needed to communicate in Chinese, which I often have to for products I’ve ordered or other mishaps, all I did was use ChatGPT and compare the result in other translation apps to make sure it approximated what I wanted to say. I also included the English version for completeness and accuracy. While it’s true I should learn other languages… right now it’s simply easier to assume computers can take on this role in the near future, at least until ChatGPT can be trusted as an education tool.
I am stunned that only one of 99 comments here mentions ChatGPT. If computers can transform one language into another as fast as I can type, why would I try to learn to do it with my brain? It's like majoring in the abacus.
I think it depends on your goal. If it’s to communicate, I think it’s fine to use machine translations especially in limited situations like directions or something like that. But language is also a social act, and you can’t really build the same rapport with someone using a translator as you can by speaking their language- especially in person.
But the machine translations are not (and will probably never be) perfect I’ll show you why:
Habló con su jefa y le dijo que le tiene ganas.
Google translate:
He spoke to his boss and told her that he feels like it.
Well in Spanish this could mean:
(He/she/you) talked to (his/her/your) (boss/wife) and told (him/he)r that (he/she/it/you) (somewhere between wants and craves) (him/her/you/it).
This sentence mind you, isn’t especially contrived. It’s just how people talk in Spanish. And while all of these potential translations are good, only one is actually accurate. The only thing that it certainly doesn’t mean is:
He spoke to his boss and told her that he feels like it.
Which is what Google said it meant.
The problem is that what may be and can be ambiguous in one language, often needs to be explicit in another language. And when it must be explicit, the translator or whatever’s translating makes a choice and you don’t know what’s being said on your behalf. And while you can certainly improve a machines ability to guess what’s meant, you’d have to change the languages themselves to actually solve this problem.
What I find most amusing is when English speakers complain about why Spanish uses genders and say its pointless. Because Spanish uses genders for precisely the same reason English does. To add specificity and make things less ambiguous.
I realise this is a very long way to both agree with what you said and disagree.
It’s easy. The Chinese companies that do business with me speak English to me.
However, after the first couple of times trying to teach in China and South Korea, I turned down further gigs, because I felt the students were not understanding me.