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Hands on With the PSP Talkman Translator
PSP News writes "Lik Sang has a review and hands on of Sonys new Talkman accessory for the PSP, which enables translation of 4 of the worlds most spoken languages. From the article: 'Traveling and meeting people from all around the globe sure is fun, but may have its drawbacks when you're not speaking the language. To ease this barrier, innovation comes via Sony which took ScanSoft's speech recognition software and created both an universal language interpreter and trainer for English and a couple of Asian languages: Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin) and Korean.'"
Sannolikt alla dessa icke språkkunniga folken som strövar över vidderna därute.
The top four are the following
1. Chinese* (937,132,000)
2. Spanish (332,000,000)
3. English (322,000,000)
4. Bengali (189,000,000)
I'm not going to stick a PSP in my ear! Have you seen the size of it? I'm sticking to my fish, proven technology.
Software solutions are great, but *be sure* to memorize (with your brain) "Where can I buy batteries?" in your target language...
If it has a phone line plug, maybe we can use it for calling tech support?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I guess this isn't going to be as big a hit among the international business community as Sony might have hoped.
Ok, so not very widely spoken, but despite rampant racism against ethnic Koreans in Japan, a lot of younger Japanese are really getting into Korean culture and are starting to choose Korea over the Americas and Europe as their favorite international tourist destination. (namely because of Korean soap operas, but that is beside the point). Sony would probably lose a significant chunk of sales in its home market if it neglected to include Korean.
Monstar L
And how much Japanese or Korean do you know?
This stupid meme pisses me off to no end. I'm here in Japan and frankly the Japanese speak far better English than we (generally) do Japanese, and we're students learning Japanese. Yes, a lot of Japanese speak poor or no English, but very, very few Americans speak another language; further speak a non-Romance or Germanic language with any real skill. Yes, English study in high school is a joke. But on the whole, the Japanese are much better at speaking to foreigners than most American are.
And frankly, I have some rspect for the people who don't speak English. Unlike us South Asians who speak English as some post-Colonial hang up, they have their language and they use it.
Finally, it's damn hard to learn a language, especially when its so different from your native one. Japanese is not the hardest language to learn (out of what I've studied that distinction would either go to Chinese or Arabic). That some people can speak any English at all is amazing.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
The full scope and scale of this technology in the years to come. I'm a first year chinese student at Vassar College, with the full intention of becoming fluent - will learning a second language become useless and a waste of time when this technology improves to such a point that people will be able to speak quickly and naturally in their native tongue and have everyone else understand them with the help of a simple computer?
True, but you cannot extrapolate too much from your anecdote. Even by conservative estimates, the Mandarin dialect accounts for 800 million+ almost-native speakers. Your experience is colored by the fact that Cantonese is especially overrepresented in California. If you take a random Chinese person in China (or even Asia), there's a high probability that he or she understands Mandarin. It's true that the probability is much lower if you take a sample from the Chinese in the US, but there are over a billion Chinese in China and only a few million in the US. While there are indeed a lot of different and mutually incomprehensible (spoken) local variants of Chinese, in the larger scheme only two count: Mandarin and Cantonese.
Mandarin was the local dialect of the area around Beijing, and later adapted by the government as the official national language of China (both the People's Republic (PRC) and Taiwan). In absolute numbers, it is by far the most important. In the PRC, although most regions and provinces have their own dialect used in daily life, the language used on TV and school is Mandarin. This may sound like Mandarin is a second language to the local dialect for most Chinese, but it's more like a "second native" language, as 1) all courses starting from elementary school are completely in Mandarin regardless of the local dialect, and 2) the script is the same as the local dialect. Thus, the majority of Chinese from Taiwan or the PRC will speak Mandarin (in addition to their own local dialect).
Cantonese is the native dialect around Guangdong (Canton) and Hong Kong, in the south. It's less important then Mandarin, but overrepresented the West (especially California and in the UK). Its importance is due to two factors: 1) a large proportion of early Chinese emmigrants came from the Guangdong (so many later emmigrants even from other provinces learned it as it was the language of the established community) and 2) it's the native language of the economic powerhouse Hong Kong. Most younger people from HK speak Mandarin pretty decently nowadays, but not as well as those from the PRC, since (AFAIK) courses in HK schools are still taught in Cantonese, and Mandarin is indeed a second language. However, many older Chinese emmigrants in the US and their descendents only understand Cantonese.