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Shouldn't Every Developer Understand English?
Pickens writes "Jeff Atwood has an interesting post that begins by noting that with the Internet, whatever country you live in or language you speak, a growing percentage of the accumulated knowledge of the world can and should be available in your native language; but that the rules are different for programmers. 'So much so that I'm going to ask the unthinkable: shouldn't every software developer understand English?' Atwood argues that 'It's nothing more than great hackers collectively realizing that sticking to English for technical discussion makes it easier to get stuff done. It's a meritocracy of code, not language, and nobody (or at least nobody who is sane, anyway) localizes programming languages.' Eric Raymond in his essay 'How to be a Hacker' says that functional English is required for true hackers and notes that 'Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.' Although it may sound like The Ugly American and be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism, 'advocating the adoption of English as the de-facto standard language of software development is simple pragmatism, the most virtuous of all hacker traits,' writes Atwood. 'If that makes me an ugly American programmer, so be it.'"
... notes that 'Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise).
I thought I had read/heard somewhere (might have even been the documentary Revolution OS) that Finns & Swedes grow up with English Sesame Street available to them and as a result many of them are bilingual from a young age.
I've also ready that being bilingual or a polyglot is beneficial to thinking and memory skills. So I would caution thinking that because Linus Torvalds chooses comments in English for any reason other than more people speak it than Finnish. I would also caution you to assume that Linus learned English in order to increase his hacking skills. And I might even be inclined to argue that Linus' bilingualism aided or enabled him to reach such great heights with programming languages.
After toying with tools like ANTLR, it's not too far of a jump to say that understanding another language (even a dead one like Latin) helps you understand that information & logic can be portrayed multiple different ways with different vocabularies & grammar rules. Thus priming you for many software languages.
I cannot attest as to whether or not English buys you anything over Russian or Chinese as far as resources available on the web but I will argue that someone who has Russian as a first language and Chinese as a second will most likely be better off to code than someone with merely English as a first language (Disclaimer: I am the latter).
'advocating the adoption of English as the de-facto standard language of software development is simple pragmatism, the most virtuous of all hacker traits'
I don't think that makes you an 'ugly American programmer' but I sure do think it sets you up for some surprises in life.
My work here is dung.
Yes, almost certainly. You need to understand English to develop in programming languages where the syntax and reserved words are in English.
Next question?
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
I think 'programmers' are much to diverse to think that we need anything like this. I read somewhere that Air Traffic Control has English as the 'official' language, so that global flights maintain communication clearly, but I'm not sure we have to worry about that with coding.
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
Ja wird das Sprechen von englisch fast angefordert, aber in der Lage seiend zu denken und Arbeit in vielen Sprachen ist besser.
ed duval the very last person
...use English. Working for a firm that did medical education for Saudi Arabian doctors and nurses, everything was written in English - the default for the medical community. We had to be careful not to write above a 6th grade level, though, to reach the widest audience.
Here's a response from an American in China with some good considerations on where to draw the line: http://odwks.com/2009/03/mandarin-chinese-programmer-communites/
Unpleasantries.
Why does it have to be *functional* English? Most of the world is procedural English with some OO English here and there... I shouldn't have to learn a new programming paradigm just to communicate!
Of course programmers should speak English. I'm not saying only English speakers can be good programmers, but let's be honest -- English is the most common spoken language on the planet (I didn't say first language.) So, it's almost like a "standard" for communication, which is pretty key for geographically-distributed collaborate development (i.e., programming, especially in FOSS land.)
This isn't so much a case of someone being so "bold" as to "ask the unthinkable" as it is someone asking a question with an obvious answer by which some (silly and offen-sensitive) people will be offended. Maybe a troll for blog hits/ad impressions?
Heck, even many of the most popular programming languages use English keywords! Not much to see here, move along at whatever pace you find most comfortable...
everything in moderation
Mexico has been a country where the Internet has reached the majority of the population. Internet Cafes are practically on every corner of Mexico City, people know about youtube, etc.
And yet, I'm constantly asked by younger relatives or friends to help them with some task (usually their homework). I ask them to search the wikipedia, and they say that they can't find what they're looking for. I ask: Did you search the ENGLISH wikipedia?
Turns out they don't know English and are too lazy to learn.
English has become the de-facto language for air travel and academic research as well. When efficient, accurate communication is required, there needs to be a common language that is used. The choice of the language isn't so important, as long as the community comes to a consensus (whether explicitly or implicitly).
I can confirm that linux is bi. My girlfriend and I had a threesome with him. I thought it would be cool to watch him fuck my girlfriend ...
Sounds like you have a completely fair scheduler enabled.
My work here is dung.
I, for one, welcome our new ulgy American overlords...
All your base are belong to us!
Cool, that sounds interesting. Upon what will you base your argument? Or have you confused "argue" and "assert?" An unfounded, unbased assertion is not an argument. HTH!
everything in moderation
I thought I had read/heard somewhere (might have even been the documentary Revolution OS) that Finns & Swedes grow up with English Sesame Street available to them and as a result many of them are bilingual from a young age.
Well, as a Finn I can tell that most of the programs in our TV, movies in theatres, etc. are still in english. All that are made outside Finland except for most of the ones meant for children under 10. They have finnish subtitles but we feel that dubbing them as most countries do would be just stupid. It does improve our english.
However, the main reason why finns speak pretty decent english is our school system. Studying english is mandatory from grades 3 to 9 in the elementary schoo and any route you continue from there also requires you to study english. We believe that in the modern world it is just a basic requirement for everyone to understand the same language.
Why Torvalds speaks good english is not because we think that programmers need that but because we feel that everyone needs that. I agree that everyone should speak english but disagree that programmers have much extra reason to do so.
I visited St. Petersburg in Russia a week ago and nobody spoke english well. People on the streets weren't able to help us with directions when we needed some, we could ask nothing at the shops, etc... Even the staff at MacDonalds couldn't understand words like "Meal" or "Fries" in english. It sucked pretty much.
I think it's a more general statement: "All programmers should understand and be reasonably fluent in one common language.". It just makes collaboration easier if there's one language everybody can use when they need to talk to each other. It just so happens that English happens to be the one language with the largest "market share", because of the way computer programming started off. Personally I don't think English should get primacy just because it's English, but at the moment it probably involves the fewest people having to learn a language they don't already know. Plus, as noted, it's such a mongrel. As the joke goes, it doesn't so much borrow from other langauges as chase them down a dark alley, whack them up the back of the head and riffle their pockets for vocabulary. English is probably the best language out there when it comes to having short, direct ways of saying technical things. To me, those things give English the best claim to the position.
Practically every Finn under the age of 30 is bilingual, and the vast majority of those under 50 are bilingual.
We have subtitles instead of dubs which VASTLY helps with learning the language. That, and games. Games are in english, and we play a lot of games.
However, regarding the original post, I think that knowing ANY language by heart is the most important tool for a coder. Let it be your mother tongue, or any other, as long as you know one language throughoutly, you'll be that much better as a coder. The logic for this is hard to explain, but once you understand how languages, in general, work, it's that much easier to learn a new one (were it foreign language, or a programming language).
However, having a common language (with English being the most reasonable one since it's taught and talked throughout the globe) is vitally important for Coders, in general, to learn more efficiently and to communicate with eachother. Comments are naturally a way of communication.
Everyone should use English. It's the lingua franca of the world now.
*ducks, runs*
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I remember slamming my head onto the table over partially localised expressions in the Microsoft Office apps. At least the language for mathematical expressions is localised, and also some scripting language if I remember correctly.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Not only do they exist, Wikipedia has a (probably incomplete) list of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages
I remember running across a reference to one additional language - IIRC, its name began with symbol used for the unit angstrom, and it was developed in one of the Scandinavian countries.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
I read an anecdote somewhere that went something like this:
-rozzin.
This certainly wouldn't be the first time English was agreed on as a global language.
Speaking as a native English speaker resident in Finland, the idea that all young Finns are so wonderfully multilingual is unfortunately not the case. Especially outside of Helsinki, it's pretty easy to find young people who can't even hold a simple conversation in English, and the average Finns has about as much passion for the still-obligatory Swedish as Hungarians or Romanians did for Russian in the times of Communism. There are plenty of monolingual Finns.
Then it is decided all programming languages will be based on Latin.
perscribo("Salve mundus");
print ("Hello World")....?
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
English is also the international language of aviation. When a Swiss airplane is landing in Egypt, the pilot speaks English to the tower. Why? Because the US and England had the first major commercial air industries.
At the turn of the last century, if you wanted a science or engineering degree, you had to learn German, as all the best journals were printed in that language.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The ugly American thinks that Americans only speak English.
Fixed that for you.
Changa hates change.
jeff atwood is proposing a nonsolution to a nonproblem
for historical reasons, english has become the de facto language of business worldwide, and programming as a global profession simply follows this proclivity, no questions asked, no need to underline the point
a non-english speaking programmer knows he or she is limiting their options career-wise simply by ignoring the largest resource available to them: other programmers, who are undoubtedly speaking english, even if they themselves are not native english speakers. and so there is no need to insist programmers speak english, as it is self inclusivity (of those who choose to speak english freely) that is the prime motivator here, not esternally applied exclusivity (insisting someone speak english... that already knows its important)
if a programmer self-excludes by choosing not to speak english, who cares? its there choice. let them program in english language isolation. how does that effect you? its not like you are going to an english language symposium and run into someone who insists you speak hindi to them, or comment on an english language programming tip site, and run into a comment in mandarin, or sit next to a programmer in the office, who only speaks spanish. the hindi speaker would have never gone to the symposium in the first place: its in english, announced up front. the mandarin speaker would not comment in the english language programming site: all the other content is a sea of english, what's the point? and the spanish-only speaker would never have been hired in the most probably english-speaking place of business in the first place, you would never run into such a person
in other words, jeff is pointing out a nonexistent problem, that even if it existed, has a solution proposed which is pointless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm Russian, and computer languages with Russian keywords look very awkward to me.
First, there's a problem with grammatical cases ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case ). A lot of languages with Russian keywords suffer from it (1C, I'm looking at you!).
Second, Russian words are usually longer than their English counterparts.
Third, Russian keyboard layout clashes with some useful characters (keys '', '[', ']', ';', '"' are used for Russian symbols). And I can't remember a language with less letters than English :)
Of course, some of these objections may not apply to other languages.
If I recall correctly from my graduate-level psychology of language course, children can't learn a language from TV. They need to interact with speakers, in the language in question, to learn it.
Are you adequate?
Pilots and ATC do the same thing. Its because the guarantee of pilots being able to communicate with each other and with ground control is much more important than the alternative, for obvious reasons. Whether this argument applies to all coders might be subject to some debate, but I imagine for mission critical software like for medical devices or say, ATC, its a no brainer.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
TFA has many comments on its own page that agree with you, saying that this is a non issue. Of course, all of those people can already speak English, or else they wouldn't have been able to read the article. The millions of programmers who only speak Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German, etc. are unlikely to chime in here to argue against you. You probably didn't have a conversation just last week with a developer who only speaks Korean.
I'm only sort of disagreeing. If I were a non-English speaking programmer with the time and resources to learn English, I probably would. I'm just saying that its hard to have a useful discussion about this, since the people most likely to have opposing views can't understand what we're saying.
/...
I didn't expect anything different, in fact it would have surprised me if such a comment wouldn't have popped up.
Let's rephrase the Subject: "Shouldn't Every Developer (but the French) Understand English?"
And you couldn't be more wrong.
Je ne parle pas francais.
I think I'll have to jump in with a correction here. Finnish is considered to be one of the hardest languages to learn, while english is considered one of the easiest.
If you look for a language similar to finnish, try hungarian (for some weird reason, both nations have a common offspring, no idea why one ended up in the north of Europe and the other in the southeast, maybe they don't like each other much ;-) Mika Hakinnen used to have a large fan crowd at the Hungarian Grand Prix for exactly this reason.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
Idiot programmers make the same idiot mistakes regardless of what language they speak. I'd much rather work with a brilliant, non-English speaker who can read and understand code (i.e. my code or anyone else's) vs. an English speaker that can't read code and is perpetually inserting screw-ups that I have to go in and mop up later.
stuff |
I think that his argument was based on his preceding statements. He said that bilingualism increases cognitive and memory skills (it does), and from that he noted that a bilingual programmer will probably be a bit better off than somebody with only 1 language under their belt. Just because you state your claim after the evidence doesn't make it any less of an argument.
As someone who learned english from computer manuals and TV shows at the age of nine I feel the need to call bullshit. I don't think I learned any english at all in school and as a kid I was constantly confused by those of my classmates who seemed to speak worse english at 15 than I did at nine, later I realized that a possible explanation for this might have been that I was exposed to the english language on a daily basis from an early age while most of my friends never encountered it outside of class until they were in their teens, and even then they preferred to read the subtitles in movies rather than just listen. So yes, I do believe just hearing and reading english can be enough to learn quite a lot.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Speaking as a native English speaker living in England, it's pretty easy to find young people who can't even hold a simple conversation in English.
Let's face it, even if an education system offers it doesn't mean everyone will take it up/do well at it. I would imagine that those who go on to be capable programmers will have done better in their education though.
You're as wrong as you can be. Finnish is an ugro-finnic language, meaning its closest relatives are Estonian and (far away) Hungarian. It is not even indoeuropean: English is closer to Sanskrit, Russian and Farsi than Finnish. Finnish does not have articles, has 15 or 16 cases depending on dialect, has a completely different set of sounds, and sports oddities such as lacking a verb for "to have".
The only thing in common is the Latin alphabet, which the Finns use much better than English speakers since their language is much easier to spell.
The closest language to English is French. Even though it is not a Germanic language, most of the words (and spelling horrors) in English come from French, and English grammar is fairly easy to pick up anyway. This means that language proximity is fairly irrelevant when there is no application in study of the language.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Although I prefer Esperanto.
...has substantially influenced the world of programming languages, and he is not a native English speaker. Granted, he specifically avoided producing languages for commercial use.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
<quote>All the main programming languages were invented in the English speaking world, by English speakers for English speakers. </quote>
...
....
All?
pascal, python, ruby,
Using English helps, as words can be used without connotation. Spam is spam, the same for bug, loop, goto, byte, computer,
Speaking as a south american living in the US, I have to say that I'm glad english is the main programming language. I don't know about other languages, but with spanish, you have too many words to say the same thing. A code in english would probably gain a few hundred lines if it was written in spanish hehe
Except, apparently...in customer support call centers.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I read your comment and the comments below yours. There is a misunderstanding. In July of 2009, there will be only an estimated 5,250,275 people in Finland. The entire country has the population of one large city. Much of what they have comes from somewhere else.
I have gathered considerable information about why Scandinavians speak English. This is the story, using the Finns as an example:
Since so few people want to learn Finnish, they had to choose some other language, or not be able to communicate with the rest of the world. What other language should they choose? Not German, since the Germans made so much trouble for everyone in World War Two. Not French, since the French treat people who can't speak French perfectly as social inferiors. Not Italian, since you have to be passionate to be Italian, and besides, Italians are so self-defeating.
In the late 1800s, the chosen language was French. But, a little at a time, the arrogance of the French caused people to choose a lesser evil: English. It's not that the English were wonderful, it's just that the English were the least annoying. Also, the English had been engaged in violent empire-building, so anyone who knew English could go anywhere in the empire to do business.
It helped that people in the United States spoke English. There was a huge amount of material available in English, because it was spoken in two populous countries. So choosing English gave more benefits than other languages.
There are other reasons, but I have to go back to work.
Perhaps if China had gone for the model that Japan has taken, with a significant domestic technical literature in their native language, it would be the case that within a few decades written Chinese would become a major language, at least for academia. But at least on present trends they don't seem to be doing that: to the contrary, the most prestigious domestic Chinese journals (excepting those specifically on Chinese history and literature) are written in English. That might change, but I don't see evidence of it happening yet. The fact that English has become the de facto standard for Indian scientists and academics (again, excepting some specific fields like Hindi literature) also helps bolster its dominance.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In my time in Paris (only a week), I didn't meet a single person who spoke English outside of museums or stores close to them.
That's quite likely. I doubt you met anybody who couldn't speak English, but you would meet a lot who didn't. Especially in the holiday season. When I was working in Paris I found that almost everyone spoke English until the tourists arrived, and then nobody did.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Yes, but the French are well know for their obstinate defense of their language and culture; frequently refusing to adopt foreign words, technologies, and culture until a french equivalent is re-created from scratch.
a MINORITY of french, particularly a few academic and minister with nothing else to do do that. But most french could not care less. I never used couriel or whatever it is called, and everybody I know use email as word.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
No, you guys should all learn English. And if you foreigners have trouble understanding our code, we American programmers can be helpful and WE CAN WRITE OUR COMMENTS LOUDER, BY TYPING IN ALL CAPS.
German is a lot closer to English than French is. Dutch is even closer. French provides a lot of English vocabulary, but not the grammar and almost none of the most common words.
The cake is a pie
Try German. Just about anything that requires a sentence in English can be said with one 14-syllable German word. :D
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
bilingualism increases cognitive and memory skills (it does)
Is this proven at all? It would seem obvious to me that those with better cognitive and memory skills are more likely as a result to be bilingual... but if there is evidence that bilingualism causes better cognition and memory I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Mein Auto gibt mir eine Spassestreibendafahrvergnugen!
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I visited St. Petersburg in Russia a week ago and nobody spoke english well.
Unfortunately this is so. I'm from St. Petersburg originally, and recently worked there briefly as a developer. Developers in Russia are actually the most English-literate group (other than linguists?) - they have the most incentive to be immersed in any sort of English-speaking medium.
The problem is simple - dubbing. More than half of TV and movies shown in Russia are from English-speaking countries, like everywhere else, but they are all overdubbed with Russian speech. Change that to subtitles and at least the structure and intonations of the English language become internalized as you grow up, making the acquisition of English a piece of cake.
My cousin in Israel grew up perfectly trilingual, because she was from a Russian family and all of TV was in English.
>>>I found that almost everyone spoke English until the tourists arrived, and then nobody did.
In other words the French are rude. When someone from a foreign country walks into an American store, we do our best to help them, like finding a translator. We certainly don't snub them & pretend to not hear them.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
And all these years I thought all functions were written in German:
"GetStringLen()"
In other words the French are rude
Oh, you have no idea.
Being Canadian, I was forced to take French in high school, so I can read it fluently and converse somewhat.
However, my "French" has a strong Québecois accent. On the French I-spit-upon-you scale, that makes you more of a target than even Algerians.
By day 3 of my first visit to France I decided I'd get along with the natives much better pretending to not speak a word of French.
I learned my first programming language, before I was able to speak any sentence in English. I learned for example the commands:
GOTO, PRINT, INPUT and other terminals like , ; . + - / =
I didn't need to understand what the real English meaning of these words were, I just read the documentation and used it.
Not really. Both languages do belong into the Finno-Ugric family of the Uralic languages, but Mongolian is an Altaic language and the rare coincidences in vocabulary are nowadays considered accidental and attributed to language contact, not genetic relationship.
The closest living language to Hungarian is Mansi. There is a (to me) pretty sound theory that due to sound shifts, Mansi is actually the same word as Magyar. Try the Wiki for comparison. There is, however, a kind of revisionist history in the making in Hungary, because some Hungarians really don't want to be related to Mansi people who smell of fish and construct elaborate theories about being related to noble warriors like Turks, Scythians and Mongols instead. Those theories are refuted in the scientific community, but the revisionists aren't really keen to listen.
Being Flemmish (Northern part of Belgium, go look it up if you want =) my mother-language is Dutch and French is my second language. That said I daresay my English is way more fluent than my French simply because I use it a lot more (at work, hobbies, media, etc...).
Saying that English is closer to Dutch strikes me as odd. Sure there are similarities, but French and English are MUCH closer than Dutch is vocabulary wise.
As for your example : "ik lijk het huis" indeed sounds a lot like "I like the house", but it doesn't make sense, it translates more or less into : "I corpse the house" (!?!). It's actually funny to see how French & English people can fail so miserably at understanding each other; while written both languages share a lot of words but they simply pronounce them completely different.
As for translating your example in Dutch : /.)
"The only thing in common is the Latin alphabet, which the Finns use much better than English speakers since their language is much easier to spell."
would become something along the lines of
"Het enige gemeenschappelijk is het Latijns alfabet, dat de Finnen veel beter gebruiken dan de Engelstaligen aangezien hun taal veel eenvoudiger te spellen is."
In French it would be (very rough, my french is *extremely* rusty) :
"La seule chose en commun est l'alphabet Latin, ce que les Finlandais employent beaucoup mieux parce-que leur langue est plus facille a epeller"
(someone should spell-check and fix the grammar I suppose, I had to leave out accents since this is
PS: I must agree that for that sentence, Dutch is more close than English is... but still similarities can be found towards the French one too. From a practical point of view I've found myself in countless situations where I had to find a word in English by mentally going via French, or vice versa.
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
For years after those days, I talked in my sleep. My wife told me that one night I told her I loved her, but I defined my variables first and the syntax was recognisably FORTRAN. I'm lucky I guess, I don't think a non-programmer spouse would have understood.
(Sigh) sometimes I think I work too hard.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I've been told that the best way to get the French to speak English is to speak French... badly.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I again recommend Rhabarberbarbara as a funny example of this. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I speak both Hungarian and Finnish, and let me tell you; those two languages have almost NOTHING in common, except for a similarity in how the grammar works as a system - but the cases and the tenses are formed in drastically different ways, and there is no correspondence of tenses. And the vocabulary is completely different, except for a handful (about two dozen) words.
Hungarians have just as hard a time to learn Finnish as do Brits or Icelanders. And vice-versa for Hungarian.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Even while in Paris, it does not matter whether your card's native currency is Euros, Dollars, Pounds or whatever because in all of my worldly travels everyone I have asked has understood what I meant when I held up my card and said "ATM?"
> Now, try talking to an Italian who learned
> English from a Scotsman. GFL deciphering _that_
Funny, once while working in Hawaii, I caught up with a couple making their way down the sidewalk and realized they were speaking German. I slowed and eavesdropped to see how much I could still understand(it had been years since I had practiced). Anyway it turns out they are staying in the same hotel as I. It becomes clear that they think they are having a private conversation. ;-) I follow them onto the elevator, stand next to them with a blank expression as they continue to converse about their intimate plans in front of me, and when they got off I said "Guten abend". They froze, turned pale, and turned around and looked at me in horror. I smiled as the doors closed. Then the man burst out laughing as the car carried me away.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
That doesn't surprise me.
However, when I went to Paris last summer as a tourist, I quickly found that almost everybody spoke English. The trick was to open the conversation in French and such is my expertise in that language that pretty soon they'd switch to English.
I think you only need to demonstrate a willingness to try to speak French to get the French on side.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
If you think Finnish or Hungarian are difficult, you should play around with the languages spoken by some of the native north americans... Imagine infixes, where you split apart a word and stick a new syllable in between the two halves to conjugate... and those conjugations are based on the physical position in space the speaker is to the object, and which direction he's facing!!! And that doesn't even take into account the tones and the respect-level modifiers!
You took a fairy from Northern Ireland? I suppose Orangemen are not the only fruits.
Whenever people say "The French are rude", when the inevitably really mean is "People in Paris are rude". Once you get out to the countryside, folks seem quite nice.
When in doubt, check Wikipedia: Cognitive Advantages to Bilingualism. I also wrote a little more here.
Try German. Just about anything that requires a sentence in English can be said with one 14-syllable German word. :D
Sounds a bit like Haskell =)
The thing about the Quebec accent is it's the French equivalent to "redneck" English, and it often triggers similar responses. Even within Quebec, if you go to an area where the accent is less slangy than yours, people will tend to act a bit snobbish.
The result is that many educated Quebecers wind up developing two dialects, one for the pubs, and a more refined elocution for business. It's not quite Parisian French, but a hybrid somewhere in the middle.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
My wife is a pilot, and she tells me that (oddly enough) it is American ATC who are the worse offenders for not using ICAO-standard English. The ICAO standard may be to say "Turn left 30 degrees to enter a circular holding pattern", but the American ATC will be the ones to say "Ya'll hang a left now and hang around over the island until we're ready for ya, OK?"
When people get confused, they blame the damn foreigners for not understanding English, instead of their own ATC for not using the standard terms which the pilots are required to know.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
This is they key (french guy speaking).
Trying to show people that you cared enough to learn "Bonjour", a few words (whatever the quality) and then switching when you've shown enough interest to the local place goes a long tway to show people you're not snubbing THEM.
And I try to learn a few words as well when I go to a foreign country before switching to english.
So I don't feel confident when I speak it. Add the finnish shyness to that and you have people who avoid starting a conversation in english or engaging one. I am sure that they could converse better if they absolutely needed to, if it was written or if you happened to be really nice young woman who they wanted to make a contact to...
I've been a Finland a fair number of times, and I think this lack of confidence is quite common. I took a tour of a castle, and I was the only native English speaker in the group - the tour was advertised as being in English. The guide spoke wonderful English, and the whole group, (including some Spanish, German, Italian and a Finn) could all understand it. But she kept looking over to me asking me to correct her or supply a better word.
I think that although the Finns can understand English very well (because of the TV and movies already mentioned) outside of the big cities they don't get much practise to speak it. And, this is key, they don't realise how globalised English is these days; a typical native English speaker hears English in a wide variety of accents, and so is used to non-perfect English. But I think minority languages (Including French! :-)) are not so used to this, and thusly speakers of those languages feel a great lack in confidence because they can only speak English 80% as well as they can speak their own language.
As a good friend of mine (who is a linguist and speaks 4 languages fluently and several others enough to be able to struggle through a novel) put it: "The French language is always spoken perfectly, but the English people need to suffer people torturing their language".
Speaking as a native English speaker living in the USA, it's almost impossible to find a young person who can hold a simple conversation in English. Most of them are so ADHD they can't complete a sentence.
Is this really true? I grew up in Massachusetts and studied French there. Most people there don't realize that the country on the other side of the border is a French speaking one. I was amazed and surprised the first time that I hitchhiked to Quebec. No, seriously, I didn't know that not only was a Quebec a Francophone nation, it was a strictly francophone nation. English just ...stops... about two meters from the border.
Having two years of high-school French helped offset the culture shock somewhat. But only now am I beginning to be able to understand anything that anyone says to me in French. People understand what I say to them: I just don't understand anything that is said to me. Being in a place (Oregon) that is 3000 kilometers from any French speaking people doesn't help. I can get Montreal radio stations in French through steaming FM audio, but I can only understand about one word in ten.
DVDs help. Due to the insistance of the Parti Quebecqois, French is an official language of the NAFTA alliance. Even though there are 350 million English speakers, 120 million Spanish speakers, and only 7 million French speakers in the NAFTA countries. All the DVDs of newer Hollywood movies are translated twice into French. Unfortunately, the audio translation and the subtitle translations NEVER match each other. You can't select French audio and French subtitles, focus on the spoken words and follow them with the subtitles the way that you can with the English subtitles (that are available for deaf people). It would be fantastic for language learning if this were possible, especially for vowel-rich languages like French and Spanish that are spoken about twice as fast as English.
By the way, I've never been able to hear any difference between Quebecqois French and Parisian French. People have told me that "people in Quebec don't speak French, they speak some French-like dialect". That is nonsense.
Just how different is Quebec French from Parisian French? Are vowel sounds elongated, as in the difference between North Carolina English and 'Omaha' (television standard) English? Is the rhthym and the vocabulary markedly different, like Jamica English and 'Omaha' English?
Are they nearly mutually incomprehensible, like Spanish from Madrid vs that of Barcelona?
Any chance that I can get a few semi-serious replies instead of being mod'ed down to -1?
As a native English speaker who's learned to speak Spanish, my personal opinion is that I'd prefer for everyone to speak Spanish. It has the advantage of being much simpler to learn than English due mostly to its adherence to rules (fewer irregular verbs and such) and it's a lot more pleasant to listen to all day than English. And there's something to be said for a language that makes it simple to write what you hear and say what you read regardless of whether you understand the words or not...as a Spanish teacher of mine was fond of saying, "There are no Spanish spelling bees."
I also find the "how long it takes to say" argument to be relatively pointless. Unless you're doing policy debate or having to record the disclaimer at the end of a commercial, I don't think the speed at which you talk is governed by how long it takes to say the words. For me, at least, once I became fluent, I was able to speak at the same rate that I could form the thoughts I needed to express in both English and Spanish.
But it seems that English will be the x86 of languages. There are better alternatives, but since everyone targets the most popular one, everyone else needs to target that one. There are also other advantages to English that are inherently technical. For example, if source code is encoded in UTF-8, each accented character would take up 2 bytes. Using English in source code means never having encoding issues. So I begrudgingly agree with the article's premise, if only because it's useful to standardize on something.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
In-'f*kin'-credible!
Actually, Americans are more likely to tell you that you need to speak English. I can't think of a single store in America where someone's going to try to find you a translator; most people simply don't have time for that level of customer service.
I even had an experience with a Japanese friend at a bank trying to cash a traveler's check, and the cashier wouldn't accept it because she had signed and countersigned in Japanese. The lady insisted that she needed to write her name "in English".
The thing is, the signature merely needs to match; there's no requirement that you need to be able to read it, and plenty of people whose valid signatures are completely illegible, even though they're "in English".
As for a standardized language for programmers: in the broadest international sense, I think that English should be the standard language simply because it already *is* for most dealings. It's nothing specific to programming. It doesn't mean that somebody can't have a very productive career in a multitude of non-English speaking countries.
Of course, if you're going to be working on an international level, you would benefit from learning a second language, period. That goes for native English speakers, too. It's not just helpful to be able to cross a communications barrier, it can also help you to appear more intelligent and friendly, which in turn make you more valuable.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Hey! Speaking as someone with ADHD, it's almost
However, the main reason why finns speak pretty decent english is our school system. Studying english is mandatory from grades 3 to 9 in the elementary schoo and any route you continue from there also requires you to study english.
Actually that is not quite correct. You can choose another foreign language instead of English (I did, starting English later - yes, I'm a Finn), and you can even go all the way up to University without studying English (a schoolmate of mine did, studying German, French and Latin instead if I remember correctly).
It is true, however, that the vast majority choose English as their first foreign language and an even larger majority will study it for at least a few years.
Like people everywhere, being over-run with tourists you can barely communicate with when you just want to get on with your life quietly can get tedious. It doesn't excuse bad manners, of course, but it's understandable.
[FUCK BETA]
Strange you should say that, as I am a New Zealander and spent about four months in France in the 90's. I knew no French at the time (bonjour, maybe???) and had absolutely no problems. The first thing I did was try to start out every conversation in French and get a little bit further each time. I really, really suck at languages (English included) so most of my conversations involved only a few lines of French and then I would throw my arms up in the air and say, "Bo?" (Which I think was French for um). I never had a problem. They were really, really nice. If they knew no English then we would descend to sign language (not the official one) and even if they didn't understand me then I would be taken to someone else who could help. I once saw my Great Uncle have a great night drinking whiskey with a man in Grenoble. He couldn't speak French and the man could not speak English. None the less, they sang and laughed and ate and drank until the early hours of that night and then met up over the next few weeks to catch up.
I think you may have never learnt the first lesson of language, which is: It doesn't matter whether you can speak it or not, we are all human. When you give someone a hug, a smile, a laugh, a sparkle in your eye, throw your arms up in horror, look down in shame, roll your eyes, show your palms, frown, skew your mouth or hold your head. It is language. You may have to learn a few local variables. You may make mistakes. People will still relate and like you because you are human too.
Better luck next time. :) Try it again, they really are a wonderful people.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Don't you know that the vast majority of imperative and object-oriented languages descend from Algol?
Designed by: Bauer, Bottenbruch, Rutishauser, Samelson, Backus, Katz, Perlis, Wegstein, Naur, Vauquois, van Wijngaarden, Woodger, Green, McCarthy.
Ok, some anglophones, but nowhere near a majority.
(And where does the insanity of "for English speakers" come from? Like foreign scum aren't allowed to use your precious VB?)
Watch this Heartland Institute video