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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

> OK allows us to view a situation in simplest terms, just OK or not.

I disagree. I find that OK implies some consent or agreement.

In Chinese there's a word I don't know how to write but sounds something like "uh" that means more "I acknowledge" without implying agreement. Actually, I don't know if it's a word, but I hear it a lot.

Whether it exists in Chinese or not, I wish English had a word more neutral than OK or uh-huh. "I acknowledge what you said" is too clunky.

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There was a Japanese client where I use to work that was in a meeting with my coworker. When my coworker would go into detail about how our products work, the Japanese client would nod their head up and down while saying Okay in English. My coworker would take pauses during his mini-lecture, asking "Do you understand what it's doing so far?" He would almost always respond with "No."

It was pretty funny watching from the sidelines as my coworker slowly slipped into insanity because of the miscommunication.

Random Edit Note:

Had a class that dealt with Supply Chains in college. We had a section devoted to negotiations, including international. As a result we had to learn about various business cultures.

One of the main points of that section was Western Cultures tend to have their words require little context (Their words are literal) and have focused more on Individualism. Eastern and Latin Cultures tend to have more of a Collectivism and their words rely heavily on the context of the situation (Their words are implicit).

This is a really common habit with Japanese speakers of English.

In Japanese acknowledging sounds know as aizuchi (相槌) are used far more frequently than in English. One common aizuchi is hai (はい) which is can be translated very literally as 'yes'. Very often I have to tell a Japanese colleague that they need to stop saying "Yes" when someone starts asking a question because they sound like they are answering it.

A way to get some insight on how Japanese speakers feel is to imagine this situation: Go into a shop, buy something, hand over your change and walk out without saying a single word. Where I'm from in the UK, not saying 'thank you' would feel very impolite and wrong. Japanese people feel the same when they listen without saying "Yes" or something similar very frequently.

Western cultures do the same thing though, they give nods and other visual cues, go "uh huh", and if they've had a course in active listening, they'll go "I HEAR WHAT YOU ARE SAYING!". (I have a friend who had a colleague who'd do that. Very annoying but it gets the point across).

I also use "right" and "ok" sometimes, with the right inflection it can signal continued interest, though you have to be careful not to sound impatient.

Another technique I find effective in active listening is to periodically rephrase/summarize/"ask for clarification" on the last minute or two. (The last one even when I fully understand the subject.)

Yeah, my Japanese teacher in college would constantly mutter "hai". She used it almost as a transitional word between thoughts.

Netherlands "Ja", similarly.

> I wish English had a word more neutral than OK or uh-huh. "I acknowledge what you said" is too clunky.

"Got it" works well for that, in almost any context. As long as you have enough context for it to come across the right way, "noted" can work too. Doesn't imply agreement, just acknowledgement.

My boss uses "understood" heavily for that purpose.

I use it all the time, and wakatta or wakarimashita in Japanese, too.

"Alright" works pretty well for me. It probably falls into the same bucket as "OK" however. Tone and context keep it out of the affirmative. "I hear you" gets thrown around a lot but if someone is looking for an answer it infuriates them in a way that "Alright" doesn't.

From military lingo:

"Roger" meaning "Received and understood"... exactly what you're looking for "I acknowledge what you said". Sometimes used as "Roger that"

I learned this in the army and still use often in conversation or text.

Except that colloquially it seems to be used basically like ok, particularly with the roger that

I worked a job where I would use roger in this sense. After I put in my 2 week's notice, a coworker told me that this actually annoyed my boss to no end. We used IRC extensively for communications, so I wrote an IRC bot that would reply "roger" to everything he said (along with some other sayings that annoyed him) and cron'd it to run a week after I had left.*

* The rest of the story is that I wrote two bots to say different things, but forgot that they'd trigger "roger" off of each other, so the end result is that I had two bots constantly spamming the channel with "roger". I guess I should have written tests!

IIRC, "Roger" came about in the early days of voice-radio communication as the old-style phonetic alphabet version of "R" (in the modern phonetic alphabet, "R" would be "Romeo") ; the single letter R was a "prosign" abbreviation used in Morse-code telegraphy (as • — • or dot-dash-dot) to indicate "received and understood." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code_abbreviations

I can't help but think of the battle droids in the (mythical) Star Wars prequels. Roger Roger.

And now you'll be thinking that all day. Sorry.

But then what happens when you hire someone named Roger?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfDUkR3DOFw#t=54s (from Airplane!)

that sounds awful if you speak to someone who's named Roger

嗯 ?

Speaking of which, "OK嗎?" is used in mandarin a lot, at least in Taiwan.

Amusingly, Google translates it as simply "OK". Maybe because there isn't a more neutral English word for OK than OK.

https://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT#zh-CN/en/%E5%97%A...

As far as I know, Google translate is broken when it comes to the word "OK", because the word is used in every website to mean "Press here if you want to continue." For example, translating OK to Korean gives me 승인, which means "approval".

Google Translate is not good for this sort of thing, since it has no clue what words mean or why they're used. Vide: https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/4352/118

You're better off using a real dictionary for single words IME

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%97%AF

https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=...

> Speaking of which, "OK嗎?" is used in mandarin a lot, at least in Taiwan.

This reminds me: I've worked closely with several people born in Korea. They're the only people I've notice who say "OK..?" all the time. Asking about it, they translated it as meaning "OK, continue" or "OK, keep going."

Also have noticed that essentially all they say in quick conversations on the phone talking in Korean to close relatives, is "uh"... I guess people talking on the phone in English say "OK"/"Yeah"/"Sure" a lot.

I've encountered that from multiple cultures: ending almost every sentence with "OK". I'm curious about the origin of it.

Same as answering complex questions with yes. (whether or not you understood or agree) Aggreableness is valued in the east, as is deference to authority.

You mean like how Swiss Germans are parodied as ending every statement in "..., oder?" ("..., or?")?

Interesting, and good to know. "Ok...?" from one of my peers would definitely be read as sarcasm, something like "I guess you want me to agree with that but I really don't" and there's an implied eyeroll. So when I've seen it from people outside my culture, I usually do a double take, think "there's no reason for them to want to be offensive here, maybe it means something else to them..." I guess just learned what it means.

"Understood" might fill that roll depending on the context. Or just "acknowledged" on it's own would be understood just fine.

'Ack' works for me.

I've been using ACK and NAK with friends, but I'm not sure we can get the non computer scientists on board...

You'd probably be surprised it also works with some older workers who were at companies that had to pay per character on the old teletype. Often, those companies had abbreviation lists and two I worked with had ACK on them. It also provided an interesting insight into what words were very important in their business communications.

> In Chinese there's a word I don't know how to write but sounds something like "uh" that means more "I acknowledge" without implying agreement. Actually, I don't know if it's a word, but I hear it a lot.

> Whether it exists in Chinese or not, I wish English had a word more neutral than OK or uh-huh. "I acknowledge what you said" is too clunky.

Not exactly Chinese, but colloquial Singapore English (Singlish) has a word "orh" [1] which sounds like what you might be looking for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish_vocabulary#O

How about "got it"?

That's what I use.

It can be very useful in violent arguments. Rather like "I hear you".

'mhm' and or 'mm-hm'

I use the "white-heavy-check-mark" emoji in text or slack chat to acknowledge without agreeing

http://emojipedia.org/white-heavy-check-mark/

I see. (ic)

10-4

Fyi, that word is "en" written as 嗯. On internet chat it is usually repeated, 嗯嗯, and Chinese chat clients have emoticons for it.

There exists a word for that in English too... I use ’acknowledged’. ;)

I believe mainlanders normally spell it "en".

I say "go on", usually with a nod, for this.

how many languages have their own spelling? i.e like this

Finish spelling: okei

Swedish spelling: okej

Russian spelling: окей

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