To be blunt and disrespectful, after seeing the author confusing Cantonese and Mandarin, I am quite skeptical of the assertions.
This is different if your audience is, I dunno, designers, or people wanting to get their feet wet. That is certainly not the case in this forum.
Also, a foreign language takes a lot of time and effort to even just become functional in it. If you are thinking in terms of managing a foreign dev team with your foreign language skills, you're thinking in terms of several years. Not just "in 2009."
Maybe I have a bad temper today, but as you said you have over 10 years of OOP experience, one would expect something jucier.
What is the audience of this forum. Looking through your list of submitted articles reveals no indication. For instance, your last submission was "Japanese Convenience Stores Thrive Despite Economic Downturn."
Foreign languages are very hard to learn. I know, I speak three. I didn't say anything about managing a foreign dev team, just that you should learn a new language. The world is flattening and I don't always want to speak English.
I don't know how 10 years of OOP correlates to a "juicy" blog post. All I can say is that in 13 hour, with close to 3500 unique visits, some people found it interesting.
I'll second that. I see a new westerners come here to Taiwan every year, many with grandiose goals of "mastering" Chinese. So far, it has broken every one of them, including myself. After six years, I can muddle my way through the Apple Daily and converse at a native-like level about topics I'm very familiar with, but all my illusions of becoming "literate" or "speaking flawlessly" died long ago.
Even now my Chinese isn't sufficient to get me a job without the benefit of having my English skills as well. Learning Chinese has been great on a personal level, but in terms of career, it was one of the most expensive decisions I've ever made.