3 ms·
Ask HN: Is knowing Chinese beneficial for a developer/hacker? How?
- yuppie_scum 5y agoNo more than French or Russian or Swahili. It would only be relevant if the business case demands Chinese language skill.
- volvarine 5y agoBut what about the immense Chinese internet and all of its resources,like Chinese forums and research papers written in Chinese?
- sircastor 5y agoThe same could be said for any language. For all its nationalism and patriotism, China is not interested (at least as far as I can tell) in being isolated. Translations of those papers will be distributed, automatic translations can be generated. If you want to work in China, there’s probably a benefit to learning Mandarin or Cantonese. But I don’t think there’s some explicit advantage that’ll come from learning the language explicitly.
- joshxyz 5y agoIt's all fun and games until you see two or more people having a hard time understanding each other. I'm in great awe and disbelief when this colleague I used to work with told me that they are also encountering language barriers with each other because there are more languages / dialects other than mandarin and cantonese, haha.
- cosmodisk 5y agoI worked in an office, where knowing three languages was a mediocre achievement at best. Everyone spoke 4,5,or even 6 languages. Yet, pretty much everyone was hardly making more than someone flipping burgers+ overtime. Knowing language is nothing, unless you can use it in some profitable way. If you are a attaché to China, of course it's useful, but if you slicing noodles in Chinese restaurant,well then hardly so.