SubscribeBehind the Great Firewall, that most of us wil rarely see.It's a one-way thing. We can see all the stuff they post, but some of our stuff (a very small percentage) is blocked.
I think we'll see an awful lot more "channelization" of the web as corporates flex their muscles and begin to funnel users through their systems. The old AOL model of creating and managing content is gone, but at some point consumers will want help navigating through piles of crap and there will be lots of companies bidding to own the access.Look at facebook, for example.
A little bird told me that twoleftfeet was thinking of a certain Chinese tube site where you can generally watch all kinds of great shows and videos that aren't really available in the US. That may not be your bag – who knows – but think about it: what if Youtube was in Chinese?Uh, Youtube is available in Chinese (that's a link to youtube Taiwan). You can of course switch your interface language to Chinese as well. But you might want to click here to change it back to English afterwards
I bet most MeFites can't name three out of four. We in the west are oblivious to how fast other countries are using the web.Alibaba isn't really the "Chinese Ebay" it's actually a site where Chinese exporters sell products to the outside world, and actually it's an international commerce hub that serves lots of countries. I did know baidu, and I read about youku the other day in an askme thread but forgot the name :P
真的啊!不难。用 windows IME 你的计算正在有. Google也有一个
我觉得看网站上的汉字真难, 因为每个字很小, 不太清楚. 再说, 多半人没有什么办法用电脑写字.
You make some interesting points, but I think it's worth mentioning that with more and more people using the internet you are of course going to see more and more people becoming non-technical users that don't know about the details of creating websites. That is not a cause for alarm if there isn't also a drop in the number of people who have expertise in this area.Oh, yeah, definitely. I didn't intend to be alarmist. There's always going to be the part of society that delves deeper than the surface level of any technology. But the internet as a social and entertainment platform was in a nascent stage when I was first learning it as I describe in my post. The teenagers who are learning it today have the internet as one of the (perhaps THE) major method of communication. Like I said, a lot of the stuff that I learned I learned because that was the only way to do it - I'm not a technical person, and I probably wouldn't have been interested in web technology had it not been for the necessity element of it. When you have a generation who has such easy access to powerful web applications, I think that will effect the shape of the web to come. You'll still have your power users, but maybe you won't have a younger version of myself who's interested mainly in the aesthetics and the language portion of the web but also gets an education on the technical aspects. For that kid it will always have been possible to click a few buttons, sign up for an account, and do pretty much anything he can think of through web applications. It's not the end of the internet or anything, but it is a change in its character.
I don't think we are in a wasteland where no one knows anything about how the internet works anymore yet :).
English is intrinsically easier to pick up than Chinese. The language is more direct. The grammatical structures are dead-simple. Oh sure, there's plenty of ways English can be complicated. But the point is, it doesn't have to be for you to be understood. You can mangle the pronunciation, destroy all semblance of sentence structure, and still be understood. That's insanely powerful.Yeah, you've obviously never tried to learn Chinese. As a spoken language, it's really simple. Chinese students never study grammar past 3rd or 4th grade. And yeah you can mangle it and still be understood, but that's probably true of most languages. Getting the grammar right is hard can be pretty hard for non-native speakers. Even simple sentences can get screwed up and you could say something like "We went and see movies" rather then "we went and saw movies". In Chinese there's nothing like that really. You might get hung up on measure words a little, and of course it can be daunting to memorize all those characters.
malevolent: I'm not convinced that the behaviour of teenagers clearly signposts the future; it's a fickle, fashion-conscious segment of society with a lifestyle and outlook that are constantly evolving towards adulthood.Me neither, for these and other reasons.
China has shown up this old lie about a free polity being a corollary of 'free markets' for the nonsense it's always been. The neo-corporatist state is now well-entrenched and finds some of its strongest support among the new bourgeois and entrepreneurs, many co-opted into the Party under Jiang's 'Three Represents'.Are you secretly Ken MacLeod?
So I shan't put you down for a newsletter then, scrump?Does it have pictures? I like pictures.
I think chinese might actually be some threat if not for the characters, but Europe, South America, Africa, and India all hate the very idea of writing in asian characters. I suspect all the other asians hate Chinese characters. ;)I suspect you have no idea what you're talking about, since they all use Chinese characters already. Only Korea uses a recent phonetic alphabet, which is actually based on Chinese characters. Japan mixes Chinese characters with two phonetic alphabets, and a few countries use roman letters to spell out their languages.
If you know the verb, the pronoun, and the tense modifier ("did" or "will") you can conjugate almost any verb. There are very few irregulars ("is" and "do," for example) but these are few enough to be learned easily, and others can be ignored for simple language.The comparison was with Chinese, though, where that's just not an issue at all. As if in English you would simply choose between: "Currently, I run", "In the past, I run" or, "in the future, I run".
And please, all you The World Will Speak Chinese Some Day people, please explain to me why, even behind the impenetrable curtain, Chinese coders code in Roman characters?What makes you think they do? Lots of compilers and interpreters should accept Unicode characters in variable and function names by now. And there's Chinese Python if you feel like having conditional statements and keywords in Chinese as well.
In five years, I predict Microsoft will be a shadow of the company it is today, having had to sell off bits and bytes to Chinese software companies...
Over 3800 syllables are distinguished in 廣韻, and Archaic Chinese had more. That would be a burden if each syllable had one symbol, but in Chinese writing we find the inventory multiplied ten-fold. It is the worst script in the world, save only one, and that one is derived from it. (I mean of course the one Sir George Sansom called “surely without inferiors,” the monumental junk-sculpture of a script that the Japanese have made by remorseless bricolage of Chinese books.)
Manderan Chinese has only four tones, they're not hard to learn.Pure, unadulterated horseshit. Or was that mother shit?
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