One Way Knowledge Transfer

This blogger understands me.

I don't understand him or her (not sure).

That's a problem for me, but not him or her.

Comments

[Akihito]

I am "this blogger", blogging on "Polar Bear Blog".

I'm sorry for my one-way knowledge theft,
which I sometimes do from English blogs. But I'm not good at writing in English at all, so please forgive me for posting some articles in Japanese without trackbacking to original posts (of course I will put the titles and URLs of the original articles).

BTW, do you think trackbacking to the post which is not written in the same language you use in your post is acceptable? Actually, I got a trackback from a chinese blog today. I can't read the post at all!

[fred]

Akhito,

I do not think you are stealing at all.

In fact, I applaud what you are doing.

I am simply lamenting the fact that I (like most americans) do not understand foriegn languages to be as fluent in the global economy as you are.

[Akihito]

Fred,

Thank you for your comment. Telling the truth, I had been in Boston for two years as a student. I met many Americans who are interested in the foreign cultures including Japanese, much more than I am. So I think it not a big problem Americans don't understand other languages, as long as they are looking toward the outside world.

And the blogosphere will be the place people learn the foreign cultures and langueges, I hope.

[Artem]

While native English speakers benefit from their language being ubiquitous, the rest of the world at least knows what language to learn for sure. You, in turn, left with the choice of Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and whatnot.

And I do not think this is a problem (yet?). Knowing English at native level still gives you a great advantage.

And that's probably good that you do not speak Japanese anyway. For "gaijins", this language is very easy to misuse in a way that makes native speakers frown. So, someitimes it is better not to know anything about the language at all than to know something.

[Steve Shu]

Yes. Language issues are tough for me too. I sometimes feel ashamed that I cannot understand languages like German, whereas my colleagues can speak both German and English.

I do rely on translation tools on the internet. FWIW - here is the Japanese to English (BETA) translation of that post via Google. Kind of rough reading though ...

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fakihitok.typepad.jp%2Fblog%2F2005%2F10%2Fgoogle_base_b57e.html&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&safe=off&c2coff=1&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

[David Gibbons]

Great exchange - viva la global village

Artem, at around 400M 1st lang. English speakers globally, English != "ubiquitous". Yet.

Interestingly, about 2/3 of us (1st lang. English speakers) all live in a single country (the US) which is again not very ubiquitous; but always makes me question whether Microsoft's "US English" setting shouldn't just be "English", with the last 1/3 (of you'all) speaking "global English"??? The tom-AY-tos actually outnumber the tom-AA-tos!

[Artem]

David, you have the point.

As you may see I am not a native speaker so I could have misused word "ubiquitous". What I meant is that almost everywhere you go in the world (at least if we limit the scope to business trips and organized tourism) you will be able to find a person who at least is able to understand English.

[vruz]

Artem:

I don't think there's an excuse for passiveness and lazy excuses.

The rest of the world, (i.e. not the U.S) too, have to choose between japanese, german, french, spanish,.......... AND english.

Speaking a language poorly but demostrating honest interest to learn at least is well regarded in favour of the poor speaker.

Let's be less pre-copernican.