[mooreed]

This project is the first that tickles my brain in the right serendipitous ways; it merges topics of my recent interests.

However, after a VERY short perusal, I grew a giant sense of empathy for non-native English speakers. The readme is gentle enough to English speakers (aka: +95% English) no less I felt like I muddled through renaming tokens in my mind as I went. However, that quickly showed me two things.

1. It reminds me why I never seem to finish classic Russian literature… so often get lost in the introductory parade of names that are a cache miss for my usual set of names.

2. This is perhaps a significant cultural muscle that has never been necessitated for English speakers. Since the earth has largely been using English (in some capacity) for significantly longer than my life span - as my favorite joke says in the punch line “what do you call someone who only knows one language… uni-lingual… jk: American”

PS: it seems like there could be an open registry maintained by “Americans like me” who would rather pre-process the code for tokens within the docs and src… seems like a “DefinitelyTyped style” definitions registry would be very niche, but SUPER useful.

[musicale]

> as my favorite joke says in the punch line “what do you call someone who only knows one language… uni-lingual… jk: American”

"Another thing to keep in mind, when you get to feeling bad about being monolingual, is that the fair question is not 'how many languages do you know?' It is, 'of the languages spoken by five million people or more within a thousand miles or so of where you live, what percentage do you know?'"

https://structuredprocrastination.com/light/biling.php

[fer]

> of the languages spoken by five million people or more within a thousand miles or so of where you live, what percentage do you know

By that metric you shouldn't feel bad for not speaking Russian in most of Russia, or for not knowing the most common languages in your immediate surroundings in large swaths of Africa (i.e. most Bantu languages would be excluded).

[notpushkin]

> of the languages spoken by five million people or more within a thousand miles or so of where you live, what percentage do you know?

IRL interactions are just one aspect of life. Pretty important, sure, but it’s not the only important thing.

[miki123211]

I prefer to view it as "what's the likelihood that, with your current knowledge of languages, you're able to communicate with any person you may presumably want to speak to in the future."

This is why it's so much easier to only speak English than it is to only speak another language.