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Order Number: 7131266882
Anyone from the gang here playing minecraft?
Hello, I would like to double my bandwidth.
Invoice #8191070453
Thanks!
Wow. But, your position on the leaderboard doesn't matter for the lottery. Regardless of your comment count, on the lottery, you have only one entry. BTW, what did you win?
Oh that's a relief. I guess you have to do 30 minutes overtime tomorrow for a complete holiday this Sunday, right?
Ben is the only one I know who was into that on the threads.
That's probably an unfair characterisation.
In the UK, everybody has to study at least one foreign language for 5 years, usually French or German. The problem is that most kids don't want to learn, and I don't think the way languages are taught is particularly good. You only really get good at a language by putting in the time to listen and speak, to allow your brain to get rewired. 5 hours a week in a classroom won't change that. But yeah, I'd say the vast majority of British people are bad at foreign languages, but most would probably remember some if forced to.
Some other European countries have incredibly high numbers of people who speak other languages, although the other language is usually English. I'd say every Dutch person I've ever met speaks perfect English, and lots of universities there even teach primarily in English. It's a less high percentage, but probably a majority of Germans speak incredibly good English too. The Scandinavian countries also usually have a lot of near-native fluency of English. Of the Romance languages, there are a lot of similarities in grammar and shared vocabulary, so they can often understand other Romance languages to varying degrees even if they're not particularly fluent. Finally, because European countries are often relatively small, and quite a lot have had frequent border changes over time, probably the majority of people living within say 100km of a border can speak the neighbouring language reasonably well. Of the Romanians I've met in real life, they've all spoken about 7-8 languages fluently, and my friend from Malta also speaks 4 languages fluently as well as her mother tongue.
The obvious immediate answer is that there are some political issues in answering that, but I've spent most of my time in mainland China, Hong Kong and more recently Taiwan!
The Chinese diaspora spread over a lot of Asia over the years. Mostly Cantonese or Hokkien speakers as they were on the south coast of China, and so anywhere near there e.g. Singapore, Malaysia, Phillipines etc all have a significant population who'd have some Chinese in their family tree. For instance in Singapore, the official languages are English and Malay, but I'd guess 30% of people would speak Mandarin at home and maybe 5% Cantonese.
Even at home, I know a lot of British Born Chinese through various language groups. The majority would speak Cantonese with their parents (because the majority of second or third generation Chinese here would have roots in Hong Kong), but they're often also trying to learn Mandarin as well.
I think it depends on the family, but yeah I think it's something like 10% of the Thai population speak some Chinese dialect as their mother tongue. How well that gets passed from generation to generation depends a lot on the individuals as well their parents ability to speak Thai.
I forgot what i won, but i converted it to $25 credits. So now I have a vps that expires somewhere in the beginning of 2027
Ah okay. I recently started a minecraft server so maybe I could invite him
Wha?
I didn't wanna offend you or Brits in general. I just meant that I heard Scandinavian schools are known to teach their kids 2-3 languages including Latin, Spanish, etc. as a part of their curriculum. It's news to me that even British schools do that, which is good.
Oh yah, I somehow forget that Taiwan, as a country also speaks Chinese variants. I was curious to know if any Southeast Asian countries have specific areas inhabited by Chinese maybe where Chinese is more popular than the country's native language and culture. You know, kinda like how China Town exists in some countries.
I came to know about Thai Chinese descendants from the movie - How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies. It's a good movie, but, Thai ads are brilliant
I forgot to say that most of the really good English speakers I've met have got good through TV - watching cartoons when they were young, then shows like Friends as they were growing up. It's basically just absorbing language content in something you really enjoy, and so you're invested it trying to figure out the meaning until it becomes so common that it's just an intuitive understanding. I think more and more people are learning via online gaming, e.g. PUBG.
Oh ok. That's cool. Hope I win something in the lottery this time around.
Oh yah. You may try to tag him here or even DM him. Dunno if he's busy, but, worth a try.
I mean you have to work for 8:30 hours instead of usual 8 tomorrow, right?
Well normally i work about 5 hours on saturday (tomorrow) and like 3-6 hours on sunday. But this week, I work 7.5 hours on saturday and nothing on sunday.
Oh yes. No one really learns English or for that matter any language using the traditional methods anymore. But, Duolingo is great for this purpose. My friends have cracked exams using Duolingo for foreign languages. As for me, I did most of my learning from English songs, atleast the accent. But, recently trying to do recording for a TTS AI, I realised speaking in American accent is a different beast than singing. Had a tough time pronouncing "a reverse flowing river or ravine is ravishing"
Oh ok. Got it. But, seriously though, there should be universal law or something against unpaid internships. Kinda feels like a glorified form of modern slavery to me.
Well my work on saturday/sunday IS paid luckily. At a grocery store
but yeah, there should be a law that requires interns to be paid
As I alluded to in the other post, I think a lot of it comes down to consumption of media.
In France and Germany, most movies and TV shows are dubbed into their language, but for most of the smaller countries it's not worth the cost of doing that for a relatively small audience and so shows are just broadcast in their original language, which is often English. So you get kids just watching cartoons for hours on end, and learn in much the same way as an English kid would get half their language exposure. I think that's why countries with smallish populations are disproportionally better at other languages, because they've always been exposed to multiple languages since very young ages, even if they only actually need to speak one at home or school.
But yeah, Brits in general don't have that. Everything is in English and there's no reason to learn anything else, and so people just don't care enough to put in the time unless they happen to particularly like languages. Most people just do the minimum required to pass the exam at school and then never use it again.
Even for me - I did 6 years of French and 5 of Latin, and I'm only slightly better at French than the other languages because I also used to read the newspaper and French novels for fun. But as an adult, I didn't travel to France very often, so didn't practice much and so over time my "French muscle" has withered away.
Actually, I remember one funny experience asking for a can of Coke in French in Brussels (which is French and Flemish speaking). Obviously he thought my French accent was so bad, he thought I must be Flemish and replied in Flemish. It was similar enough to German that I understood what he said and in the moment didn't really occur to me that it wasn't German, so I just replied to him in German and left. It was only a couple of minutes later that I realised what a weird interaction that'd been.
Hard to say. But certainly most ethnic groups everywhere tend to clump together when they're expats, just because life is easier speaking your own language to people with a similar mindset and world view of things. So, sure, I'd imagine there'd be Chinatowns everywhere you get many Chinese people, just as you get Irish bars all over the world wherever there's a group of Irish expats. Traditionally, a lot of expat neighbourhoods form due to the proximity to an authentic restaurant where they can enjoy their favourite foods that they might otherwise not have eaten for years.
I've never seen it but it sounds fun.
Hello,I would like to doublemy bandwidth.
Invoice #19584179
Thanks!
That's almost a tongue twister for natives, so I wouldn't worry too much about that!
Oh. I thought the whole internship was at the grocery store.
It should be a part of basic human rights.
Ooh no. Monday-friday is unpaid internship at a software development company. Have to do an internship for my study.
In weekend (often saturday + sunday), I work (paid) at a grocery store
yeah
Yah, that makes sense cause we were the fortunate ones. English movies were not dubbed on Tv here in India when I was a child. Moreover, subtitles weren't available. So, somewhere it did help me. The same happened with cartoons on Cartoon Network. So, we subconsciously were learning English due to lack of options.
And yes, the observation of expats clustering around authentic restaurants pertaining to their culture too makes sense.
BTW, whe you have time, just go trhough some Thai ads. They are the perfect mixture of extreme creativity and awesome comedy
were you trying to say beak-ache?
Doing free unpaid work now basically. at 40 hours a week