Re: Polyglot Challenges

As a non-native English speaker I can say that major problems for us are:

Majority of documentation is in English. Sure some things get translated in your native language but still if you want to be good you'll have to be able to read in English.
Communicating in English is also hard what adds an additional barier for us if we want to be a part of programming communities (i.e participate in international forums, international mailing lists, contribute in projects, etc).

The first problem is not very hard as to learn to read foreign language is actually is not that hard. The second problem is more serious as it takes a lot of time to study language to speak and write comfortabaly enough knowing you don't do stupid mistakes in each phrase and word.

--
Ilya Martynov, ilya@iponweb.net
CTO IPonWEB (UK) Ltd
Quality Perl Programming and Unix Support UK managed @ offshore prices - http://www.iponweb.net
Personal website - http://martynov.org

Comment on Re: Polyglot Challenges

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Re: Re: Polyglot Challenges by TVSET (Chaplain) on Apr 21, 2003 at 14:50 UTC
Fully agree with you, man. :) Just wanted to quote something I've heard from somebode long time ago (sorry, no credit): "It is impossible to be a good doctor without Latin, politician without French, and computer professional without English." (Latin, French, and English are meant as languages, of course). :) Leonid Mamtchenkov	[reply]
Re: Re: Polyglot Challenges by Petras (Friar) on May 07, 2003 at 09:00 UTC
I understand what you mean. Having lived in a non-English speaking country for three years now I can understand a lot more than I can speak. I can get by with broken Tagalog, though. But it takes time, and I'd never be able to do something technical outside of my native language. Hats off to you! -Petras Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. -Howard Aiken	[reply]