Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 11:21:10 08/03/01
Go up one level in this thread
On August 02, 2001 at 12:57:38, Roy Eassa wrote: >There seems to be so much good computer chess stuff that's in German only, and >I've been a computer chess addict since about 1980, do you think it would be >worth the time and effort for this 42-year-old American to study German? (I >studied Spanish as a child, but that would obviously be of zero help.) It's always a good idea to learn a foreign language. I would like to learn several more. I think you will find that even when you know a foreign language pretty well, the technical documents are still *very* hard to read. They won't teach you the technical terms in your class, or the chess terms or any stuff like that. So when you are reading a document, every 3rd word will be a hole in the paper. Even at that, you can usually figure out what is being said, especially if they supply a lot of equations. math is pretty well universal, so thank goodness for that. But to learn a foreign language is fun and useful. I think it helps to learn the culture. Also, when you go to visit a foreign country, I think it is essential courtesy to try and converse (at least with a few words of polite conversation) in the Lingua Franca. Don't even bother trying to use Google or Systran or any of those things on a technical document. They can't even get a simple thing correct, and with advanced technical stuff, they basically will spew out useless garbage.
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