this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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If you're from a non English speaking country, do you first have to learn English if you want to get into programming?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

English is the language of science and trade on the whole, which I think can be a good thing for the aforementioned reasons in your comment. Makes it much more universal.

I was on a trip in Spain, where students from all over the world came to learn Spanish. There were Americans, Japanese, Germans, etc (others I may have forgotten since this was during highschool!), but the gist of it is that everyone spoke their mother tongue, but the only unifying language there was Spanish. It was incredibly interesting speaking to someone who only knew Japanese and Spanish, where I only knew English and Spanish. People would talk to their friends in their native language, then relay what they said in Spanish for everyone else. It was mindblowingly cool to have a universal language to an otherwise insurmountable language barrier.

This also happened, somewhat annoyingly, in other parts of Spain. You'd be eagerly trying to practice Spanish, and spanish people would hear your accent, and would automatically switch to English for you. Same thing happened all across the world whenever we traveled. I always marveled at just how many people would switch to English whether we were in Germany or Zimbabwe.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, the world lucked out with a minimal Latin alphabet become the standard. English even lost its weird special symbols because all the good printing-press typefaces were made in Germany. It's only twenty-six discrete characters (admittedly in two cases) and they're the most common throughout all the European languages that, uh, spread their influence.

Shame you all have to deal with our bullshit spelling.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I try and pretend the spelling oddities are a feature and not a bug. If you can recognize the language of origin of a given word, it helps you know how to pronounce it,and often the definition.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Needing etymology to guess at pronunciation is why it's bullshit.

People have tried to fix it. Their partial success just created more exceptions.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I always marveled at just how many people would switch to English whether we were in Germany or Zimbabwe.

English is an official language of Zimbabwe, and German is in the same language family as English. Try to speak English to commoners in Egypt, Eastern Europe, Vietnam or even France, and it wouldn't be that easy.