Hi Arvind, Tao and all,
Some opinion out of an amicable curious thought here.
Like what Tao has mentioned, Chinese can be spoken in a much lesser number of
characters. But I do not agree that Chinese is easy to pick up
especially for a non-Chinese,
typically a westerner who has little or no idea about the Chinese
culture and how the language is used.
Writing can be 'hell' time for some. But really it can be very
interesting and even beautiful to write it.
It should come very intuitively for the very creative as the
characters are pictorial and symbolic.
I was thinking and comparing about how my parent's time when their
parents told them
to master English if they want to master the world. What they said
passed down to my generation.
that if we wanted to learn something that was of importance and that
material were in a foreign language, the best way was to know the language.
Obviously no one can master everything for everything to the level
of the native in the first culture.
But its always invaluable to learn smart on the essential
words/expressions that would make the
difference. That could take off a lot of problems.
To the non-English speakers, learning English can be just as hard.
Naturally the fastest way is to get a translation. But like I
mentioned earlier, it usually contains inaccuracies.
which can turn out to be quite confusing and even misleading. I
personally found it to be so and usually dump
the translated material and return to the original text. So the
advise given to master the language is probably the best though
a much difficult route. I think it was a thoughtful advise given.
Some sites are in pure Chinese, as do with Japanese, Tamil, Danish,
Korean etc. They all have their own perspective
on issues. They probably do not know to do the translation or maybe
they are not bothered about it because they
want only their own people to read it. I don't know. But a site
without English translation doesn't really entirely mean
the site may lack credibility. It may just simply mean they are not
effectively multilingual / have a language expert
to do the translation. I would think to present something in English
in a mistranslated way is worse than no translation.
It is a great lost to sites that do not function well in languages.
It looses responses and therefore the other precious
ideas that could lead to other areas of discoveries.
Just thought I should voice this out. And hope this is taken in
candor. I really have thought all around it before writing
this.....anyway I'll just post it.
Cheers,
Karen Fu
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