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Full time China bad youtuber has opinions on language learning
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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Doesn't really matter. What these losers fail to understand about their AI revolution is that one of the strongest things AI actually does successfully is translation.
AI translation is going to reach a point where it can just be applied to everything automatically and completely break down all language barriers, at that point the most successful parts of the internet will be whatever is the most competitive. I personally believe that will eventually be Chinese media.
We're not quite there yet but you can already see youtube doing it with auto-dub on videos. As this technology progresses it's going to reach a point where it is near-perfect and online language barriers will disappear.
Chinese will be controlling algorithms whether you learn Chinese or not when that happens.
As someone formally learning Chinese, I'm starting to suspect that nothing can ever be a 'perfect' translator.
AI is definitely good at it, and you can usually get across like 95% of the meaning. But there are so many turns of phrase in every language, with no analogy in other languages, that have nuanced meanings, with historical, cultural, and modern contexts, that takes at least many minutes to fully explain, if not hours.
Even just word order also has unspoken implications that, again, there's just no way to easily translate.
"He's talking about a specific breed of dog and because of the shared radicals it's jokingly and partially implied (but plausibly deniably not) that they're talking about confident walking but there's a double meaning that also means eating fish" is the kind of explanation you might need for like, 4 words of a foreign language. So unless you do the hard work and.. learn all the phrases and word orders and context (at which point you've basically just learned the language), I don't think any practical translation can 100% break down language barriers.
Still, maybe 95% is enough for social media to merge and whatever, I don't know.