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Which Languages Useful for Engineering ?

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coppice:

--- Quote from: blueskull on October 22, 2018, 06:20:33 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on October 22, 2018, 06:04:35 pm ---Only a small percentage of people in China with a university level education understand English well enough to hold a simple conversation.

--- End quote ---

Have seen some people with that level of proficiency, but never thought that could be the majority.

In my undergrad school we had a professor from Austria who is a safety (IEC61508 kind of stuff) expert, and he delivers one lecture every year on software freedom day, and he also delivers seminars annually on designing functionally safe systems.

Being man in charge of our open source society, I prepare for the SFD event every time for two years in a row, and I attended one of his seminars.

My experience is that most students don't talk, or speak with very bad accent, but they do understand what the professor was saying.

--- End quote ---
I have worked with hundreds of university graduates in China, both in multinationals and local companies. English standards in multinationals are typically at the level you describe - most people are reluctant to speak, but people generally understand a presentation fairly well if you have good slides to give them some written cues. In local companies, if you only speak English you'd better ensure someone can translate for even the simplest activities. If you are lucky you'll meet someone with true native standard English, but not often.

schmitt trigger:
Reading thru the posts, it is obvious that English is THE king of languages. And it will be, for the foreseeable future.

One of the reasons for that, may be that the English grammar is relatively straightforward.

Before I started studying German, I was under the impression that German was only an oddly-pronounced English. How wrong I was!! German, has several challenges which English does not have.
Starting with the noun and article genders. Myself being a native Spanish speaker, could correlate to that, but there are other aspects like cases and declinations which I had to struggle with.

Deutsche Sprache, Schwere Sprache. But as I previously stated, very worthwhile to learn.

Macbeth:
English is obviously the most important across the whole world and most important.

Chinese really means Mandarin, rather than Cantonese or traditional, and I think knowing that could very well open up whole new markets to the west - look at Dave's 3 cent micro-controller for example. There are lots of China or Taiwanese only parts with datasheets to match.

As for German - I instantly rule that out because they all use decimal points and commas incorrectly, drive on the wrong side of the road, and even worse use U instead of V for Volt  ;)  :palm:  :-DD

coppice:

--- Quote from: schmitt trigger on October 22, 2018, 07:24:40 pm ---Reading thru the posts, it is obvious that English is THE king of languages. And it will be, for the foreseeable future.

One of the reasons for that, may be that the English grammar is relatively straightforward.

--- End quote ---
English grammar isn't simple. Just look at the huge range of tenses it offers. English vocabulary is also massively diverse. I think the full OED is now up to 16 thick volumes. There are three components which have made English the dominant language in the world today:

* The British Empire spread it around the world, and it stuck to a reasonable extent in most places.
* The current dominance of the US has driven it forwards
* English speakers are really flexible with their language. There is no active effort to fossilize either its vocabulary or its grammar. Many people around the world drop fragments of English into their own language all the time.Each of those three elements has been crucial in getting English where it is.

coppice:

--- Quote from: Macbeth on October 22, 2018, 07:27:31 pm ---Chinese really means Mandarin, rather than Cantonese or traditional, and I think knowing that could very well open up whole new markets to the west - look at Dave's 3 cent micro-controller for example. There are lots of China or Taiwanese only parts with datasheets to match.

--- End quote ---
For written Chinese traditional Chinese is still pretty important for engineering documents, because of its use in Taiwan. Documents which the Taiwanese send to China will be translated to simplified Chinese, but lots of other documents remain only in traditional Chinese.

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