| ▲ | Teever 9 hours ago | |
Maybe you have it backwards? Why do you need to communicate in English with us native English speakers? Why don't we need to learn your language to communicate with you? The way I'm looking at it is that you're putting all this effort towards learning how to communicate with people who would never without an outside pressure do the same for you. If language learning is intrinsically a positive thing what can we do to encourage it in native speakers of English, specifically Americans who are monolingual (as they dominate this website)? Imagine a scenario where Dang announced that we're only allowed to post in English one day week -- every day is dedicated to another language, like Spanish, Russian, Mandarin and the system auto deleted posts that weren't in those languages. Would that be a good thing? Would we see American users start to learn Spanish to post on HN on Tuesdays? | ||
| ▲ | kace91 7 hours ago | parent [-] | |
Honestly, having a common language that offers access to most knowledge and people in the western world at once is already amazing. If it happens to be the native language of most Americans, all the better for them. A century ago it was French or Latin, and a century from now it might be Mandarin or something else. The existence of a standard is what matters. The only complain I have about Americans and language is that most tech companies fail spectacularly at supporting multilingualism, from keyboards struggling with completion to youtube and reddit forcing translations on users. | ||