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I think you overestimate amount of multilingual users and tourists. If you have 40 million country and you have 10 mil tourists over whole year given week you

by ozim 1y ago

I think you overestimate amount of multilingual users and tourists. If you have 40 million country and you have 10 mil tourists over whole year given week you might 200k users that happen to be in that country. Even if you have another 1mil expats living in that country. it still is 35mil of people vs 1mil of people for whom "your IP is from country X you get language X" is pretty good heuristic. That said I am also pissed off by that approach but I do understand there is much more people who happen to use only that language in that country. Optimizing for Expats or Tourists would be stupid as those are exceptions not the norm.

bux93 1y ago
I'm a tourist 4 weeks per year. Excluding any business travel. That's 7.6% of the time. Now, I travel internationally more than most, but it's not out of the ordinary and it's 100x your estimate. Of course, I'm multilingual even if I stay at home. Do we know how many people are multilingual? About half of Europeans speak more than one language. That's hundreds of millions of Youtube users. 22% of Americans for 76 million in the US. That's just numbers from Google's own Gemini (which is doing a bit of a half-assed job). Note that all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools (23 out of 27 mandate at least two foreign languages); you don't need to be an ex-pat, tourist, longterm resident or second generation immigrant to be multilingual. Not taking input from multi-lingual users is not just bad practice from Google, it's actually impressive how they manage to ignore people they probably know and are working with.
- wheybags 1y ago
  > all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools Ireland does mandate second language teaching in schools, it's just not a foreign language, it's Irish (separate language, not a dialect of English). And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.
  - amiga386 1y ago
    > separate language, not a dialect of English Of all the languages spoken in the UK and Ireland that argument attracts, I've never heard anyone claim that about Irish - an actual Gaelic language. > The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it. They just need to get out their word book - that's right, their focal leabhair ♫ oh get out your focal leabhair, get out your focal leabhair and we'll have you speaking Irish in a half-an-hour Sea means yes and Níl means no get out your focal leabhair and we'll all have a go ♫ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYNZbmrMg7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYNZbmrMg7M
    - wheybags 1y ago
      > I've never heard anyone claim that about Irish - an actual Gaelic language. Many people from other parts of the world don't know it exists, so when you say "Irish language", they just think you mean hiberno-english. I've never heard anyone claim it either, just assume, then get confused in conversation until I clarify.
  - michaelt 1y ago
    > And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it. I grew up in a country where we had mandatory lessons in a little-used local language imposed on us by politicians. That I learned nothing isn’t the teachers’ fault - they were simply set an impossible task.
  - david-gpu 1y ago
    Monolinguals consistently underestimate how hard it is to reach proficiency in another language. The exception to this being being raised in a multilingual home. I don't know what their reasoning is. They can plainly see around them foreigners struggling to speak, but they somehow think that it won't happen to them?
- ben_w 1y ago
  > Note that all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools (23 out of 27 mandate at least two foreign languages); you don't need to be an ex-pat, tourist, longterm resident or second generation immigrant to be multilingual. Yes, but learned at school doesn't necessarily count for much. I grew up in the UK, secondary school was post-Maastricht so I was in the EU at the time; French was mandatory, but my grasp of the language is still so bad that when I tried to say "I don't speak French" in French in front of a French person, she couldn't tell if I was trying to say "I can" or "I can't". I have pushed myself quite a bit in other languages since school, but I'm also a nerd who likes learning for its own sake. I suspect a lot of people are only just about barely able to function in tourist settings in the languages they learned at school. That said, auto-translation of videos is kinda an existential threat to hosting a language course on YouTube.
Mawr 1y ago
Huh, basically every European aged <~40 is going to know their native language + English at the very least.
- ozim 1y ago
  Knowing English is not equal to enjoying content in English. Besides that they also get German, Dutch, Finnish or Indian stuff translated that they don't understand.

by ozim 1y ago

bux93 1y ago

I'm a tourist 4 weeks per year. Excluding any business travel. That's 7.6% of the time. Now, I travel internationally more than most, but it's not out of the ordinary and it's 100x your estimate. Of course, I'm multilingual even if I stay at home. Do we know how many people are multilingual? About half of Europeans speak more than one language. That's hundreds of millions of Youtube users. 22% of Americans for 76 million in the US. That's just numbers from Google's own Gemini (which is doing a bit of a half-assed job). Note that all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools (23 out of 27 mandate at least two foreign languages); you don't need to be an ex-pat, tourist, longterm resident or second generation immigrant to be multilingual. Not taking input from multi-lingual users is not just bad practice from Google, it's actually impressive how they manage to ignore people they probably know and are working with.

wheybags 1y ago
> all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools Ireland does mandate second language teaching in schools, it's just not a foreign language, it's Irish (separate language, not a dialect of English). And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it.
- amiga386 1y ago
  > separate language, not a dialect of English Of all the languages spoken in the UK and Ireland that argument attracts, I've never heard anyone claim that about Irish - an actual Gaelic language. > The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it. They just need to get out their word book - that's right, their focal leabhair ♫ oh get out your focal leabhair, get out your focal leabhair and we'll have you speaking Irish in a half-an-hour Sea means yes and Níl means no get out your focal leabhair and we'll all have a go ♫ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYNZbmrMg7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYNZbmrMg7M
  - wheybags 1y ago
    > I've never heard anyone claim that about Irish - an actual Gaelic language. Many people from other parts of the world don't know it exists, so when you say "Irish language", they just think you mean hiberno-english. I've never heard anyone claim it either, just assume, then get confused in conversation until I clarify.
- michaelt 1y ago
  > And it's taught atrociously badly. The vast majority of graduates, after about 13 years of mandatory Irish classes, cannot functionally speak it. I grew up in a country where we had mandatory lessons in a little-used local language imposed on us by politicians. That I learned nothing isn’t the teachers’ fault - they were simply set an impossible task.
- david-gpu 1y ago
  Monolinguals consistently underestimate how hard it is to reach proficiency in another language. The exception to this being being raised in a multilingual home. I don't know what their reasoning is. They can plainly see around them foreigners struggling to speak, but they somehow think that it won't happen to them?
ben_w 1y ago
> Note that all EU countries except Ireland mandate second language teaching in schools (23 out of 27 mandate at least two foreign languages); you don't need to be an ex-pat, tourist, longterm resident or second generation immigrant to be multilingual. Yes, but learned at school doesn't necessarily count for much. I grew up in the UK, secondary school was post-Maastricht so I was in the EU at the time; French was mandatory, but my grasp of the language is still so bad that when I tried to say "I don't speak French" in French in front of a French person, she couldn't tell if I was trying to say "I can" or "I can't". I have pushed myself quite a bit in other languages since school, but I'm also a nerd who likes learning for its own sake. I suspect a lot of people are only just about barely able to function in tourist settings in the languages they learned at school. That said, auto-translation of videos is kinda an existential threat to hosting a language course on YouTube.

Mawr 1y ago

Huh, basically every European aged <~40 is going to know their native language + English at the very least.

ozim 1y ago
Knowing English is not equal to enjoying content in English. Besides that they also get German, Dutch, Finnish or Indian stuff translated that they don't understand.