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Comment by Majestic121 | Hacker News Reader

I surely hope not, learning English is much much easier than Mandarin for a good 60% of the world : anyone speaking a language using the latin alphabet so most of Europe + America North and South + a good chunk of Africa. Even in countries where the main language is not using the Latin alphabet, it is very common to speak English or French.

People might not have much of an option because English is there de facto, but learning English is much much better than having to learn both English and Mandarin

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There is a great deal more to learning a language than its alphabet, and English is probably one of the worst languages to learn that use the Latin alphabet, with many inconsistencies and exceptions in grammar and pronunciation. The reason so many people learn it is because they have to, not because it's easy to learn or use.

English is the JavaScript of human languages.

You can operate on very little knowledge of English.

Essentially you can learn middle-out vs other languages.

To understand a programming language you just need the bare bones.

English is the JS of programming languages though, being that it's everywhere and it's very easy to use.

> There is a great deal more to learning a language than its alphabet, and English is probably one of the worst languages to learn that use the Latin alphabet

No denying English spelling is particularly atrocious – but still easier than learning Chinese characters. The Chinese writing system is arguably the most difficult to learn of all writing systems in common modern use – even if your native language doesn't use the Latin alphabet, the Latin alphabet is going to be much easier to learn than the Chinese writing system is; even learning crazy inconsistent English spelling is likely easier.

Pick your poison.

Knights ride at night nightly, to get knighted.

Does that make any sense to someone learning English.

It's a silly argument though. Other countries are willing to learn English. We aren't willing, not nationally anyway, to learn anything else.

> I surely hope not, learning English is much much easier than Mandarin for a good 60% of the world : anyone speaking a language using the latin alphabet

As well as the writing system, there is another factor: Mandarin is tonal, English isn't. If your native language is non-tonal (true of roughly 50% of the world population), trying to learn a tonal language is an extra challenge on top of the general challenge of trying to learn another language. Your brain just isn't used to considering tone as semantically significant.

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