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Ask HN: How much Chinese is required to read Tech Documentation?
There's been an explosion of Chinese engineers entering in the last few years - more noticeably for me due to Vuejs. They provide Chinese documentations and I'm also seeing many third party github components being created only written in chinese.
A long assumption but I'm thinking it might be beneficial for me to learn some chinese to be able to take advantage of projects deriving from the Chinese community.
Anyone know how much Chinese I'll need to learn to be able to read tech documentations? 1 year? 5 years?
- anthony_franco 10y agoYou're better off delving deeper into learning the actual framework instead of studying a foreign language. Something similar happened with NGINX a few years ago. Almost all documentation was in Russian. But once it grew in popularity a few people just translated the documentation over to English. If you had studied Russian just to understand NGINX better, it would've been a huge waste of time, and my guess is that it'll be similar in this situation. The caveat, of course, is if you want to study Chinese for other personal reasons. In that case, by all means.
- muddyrivers 10y agoTotally agree. There is another barrier, the technical terms. Even if you know every character used to compose terms like linked list, stack, etc. when they are put together, you will have a hard time to figure them out, unless you have something like a Chinese-English Dictionary of Computer Science to look up.