Chinese for tech on the sinosphere

¿How convenient is learning (Simplified) Chinesese to read papers and articles from China? People are saying that "China will be the new technological power" and that "There are things developing under the radar of Englis-speaking media". I know it sounds like raisin, but i dont wanna spark a credibility discussion. I wanna know how big is the language barrier to the Academic/Internet Sinosphere, to consider learning chinesese as an hability for the future. How much i am missing not reading Chinese? Its Worth it?

>>85765 Anecdotally, when I was doing research as an undergrade a few years back, I came across a lot of English-language CS papers published from Chinese schools. It is my impression that most serious Chinese researchers publish in English (or at least post a decent translation). I don't have a sauce for that tho. >>85766 kys niggerglitterboy

>>85765 A lot of research papers will be translated to English because it makes it easier for the international science community to engage. My wife is Taiwanese and spent a good amount of time during her PhD study just translating papers from Chinese to English. If you want to start learning Chinese, I suggest HelloChinese. Its a solid learning application and way, way better than Duolingo. Duolingo does not do Chinese well at all. The other issue you're going to run into though is that you're going to be hitting the dictionary (I suggest Pleco) a lot in order to understand scientific words, because you're extremely unlikely to learn them from any language learning app. We're talking years of effort here, really. If you're up for it, then it does give you access to a huge amount of stuff that you'd never see in the west.

Unfortunately I think Chinese is probably literally the hardest written language to learn https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html I had the same fantasy but to be honest you're probably better off using a quality machine translation like the paid stuff from google (particularly their paid batch translation API, you can get free credits)

>>85785 The really fun part about Chinese is you can know how to speak it, but not read or write it. Hell, you can know how to read it and type it but still not remember how to write it.

>>85765 Most Chinese academics in the computer science sphere are either: >at American universities, publishing in English >publishing in English Learning any language is good for the mind but English is most definitely the defacto standard for math/science academia. At least for the rest of our lifetimes, most likely.

>>85801 It is but depends. There is a lot of scientific papers written in other languages. In fact this lack of scientific paper crossover language barrier is part of why phage therapy never became widespread in the medical field, all the studies are written in Russian.

>>85765 I've been trying to learn Mandarin on and off for a few years now as I am one of those people saying China will lead the world in many fields very soon. But learning Mandarin exclusively for their scientific articles is a bad idea. Mandarin is incredibly difficult to learn from a romance/germanic language background and you will never achieve native-like fluency. 6+ years just to get to an intermediate level is common, and everything in the article posted here >>85785 makes it even more frustrating (thanks for the interesting article). Also, they have a huge scientific journal fraud problem. Every country does because only novel papers get funding and fame, but the sheer quantity from China doesn't necessarily relate to the quality. It's not a language you learn without devoting your life to it. If you like China's culture and politics and could see a life living there, and you are studying a field that is only really alive in China, then I'd do it (that is my motivation). Otherwise, your investment won't pay off. I do think we'll see less and less use of English as "the international language" in the next few decades though, so it's a fair concern.

As a native Chinese speaker, I don’t think learning Chinese is a good choice if your sole purpose is to read scientific papers written in Chinese. The first reason is that, at least in my humble opinion, the academic world is still dominated by the English language—especially in fields like math and computer science. For example, even lectures on some advanced mathematical topics are often delivered in English, let alone the papers themselves. The second reason is that it's simply not worth the effort. As other lainons have mentioned, Hanzi are notoriously difficult to learn, memorize, and write. It typically takes about 4–5 years to reach an intermediate level. Why not just use translation services or AI instead? The true essence of the Chinese language lies in the rich literature and profound culture behind it.

>>85821 >The true essence of the Chinese language lies in the rich literature and profound culture behind it. Not OP but that's indeed what am learning chinese for. Am using apps and trying to be as diligent as possible with my Anki review, but holy soykaf is it a slow process. My handwriting for characters is like kicking dead whales down the beach dick and tying to read even children's stories is very slow since I have to pause reading every time to check new words on Pleco, add them to my Anki cards, then practice writing them a couple of times on paper before moving on. Still, am loving it and I can't fuarrrking wait to visit and speak with the natives and get called gweilo in the streets of beijing.

>>85821 > The true essence of the Chinese language lies in the rich literature and profound culture behind it. And in that instance (correct me if I am wrong) isn't it that simplified characters would not as likely be used? At least in case of any classics. Am I correct or do they have simplified versions that feel as good?

I do not wish to be rude but i think you should focus on tech and not language

>>85830 Many classical texts (if not all) are published in simplified Chinese for educational purposes. But yes, if you're a true nerd of classical literature, you can not bypass traditional Chinese. This is because some characters that are distinct in traditional Chinese have been merged into a single form in simplified Chinese. For instance, the characters "后" in simplified Chinese represent both "behind" (後) and "queen" (后) from the traditional set. These two distinct meanings are conflated in the simplified version. As a side note, the history of simplified Chinese characters can be traced back to the very origins of the Chinese writing system. The continued use of traditional characters today is more a result of political factors than educational ones.

>>85765 I don't know about papers and such, but there are many open software projects from china that aren't being translated, specially libraries related to embedded devices and non-x86 architectures. how valuable would it be? in my experience a good library can save you years of work so I guess it depends on your interests. I did learn japanese (n2) when I was a teenager just for the porn vns so it I don't think it would be crazy to learn chinese for some code. technical terms are tough tho, like hanzi is already challenging but technical terms are like a second language within the language from time to time I check gitee.com/explore to see if there is anything interesting to motivate me

>>85844 >>85844 > libraries related to embedded devices and non-x86 architectures. aka arduino and pi clone libraries. > gitee Are we not allowed to say git + hub here? There was a thread yesterday that got 404 and it started with my reply getting nixed first. I keep thinking it was for specifying that dev site?

>>85846 >aka arduino and pi clone libraries. Arduino and pi clones use regular arduino and pi libraries, I was talking about stuff beyond consumer/hobbyist SoCs. Gitee.com is the big chinese developer platform.

I have a scientific idea and have wrote up a patent. Patent office gave me a research on the topic to see if there are any other patents like mine. Even though my idea isn't fully 100% done, it has been done in some part in China 6 months ago. I see how fast at least in this tech field they have moved forward and it's scary to see how a really isolated country (linguistically) has developed. Furthermore, I remember 10 years ago I wanted to make a startup with my bros on college (a pipe dream) and I wanted to find specific pcb measurments for NFC mfrc522 traces and whatnot because I am a lazy fuarrrker and essentially I found it on Baidu quite easily even though I couldn't find it anywhere else on the internet at that time. Anywho, we're left in the dust to be honest

>>85847 > Gitee.com wow its apparently too big to be accessed!

If you’re a giant weeaboo and willing to teach yourself Japanese, learning Chinese is not that bad. I can read a lot of Chinese sentences while technically not knowing a single word besides ni hao and shie shie. The only problem is that you don’t know how anything is pronounced (I pronounce it in Japanese in my head), and you can’t write any of it yourself, so you’re limited to reading it. Good enough for internet browsing though, and reading signs and stuff.

>>85820 Are there any recommended resources for learning to write and read Mandarin?