> It is not that different from German in this matter.
I've met several Germans who spoke Russian fluently, none of them has really mastered the instrumental case, not even a friend of mine who worked at the German embassy in Moscow. Although you might say it's a minor grammar difference, this particular grammar case seems hard to grasp for people who are not accustomed to it through their native language.
Also, from my personal experience, quite a few Germans who learnt Russian had a real struggle understanding the concept of perfective/imperfective aspect.
These kinds of grammatical difficulties are typical for people who are learning only their second language after their native language.
After learning 3 or more languages that are not closely related, one is usually exposed to most grammatical features that can be encountered in the majority of the languages, so usually grammar no longer poses any challenges, but only memorizing the unfamiliar words and pronouncing sounds that do not exist in the native language.
That's hilarious. I used to work as a senior backend developer in one of Berlin's startups. Another senior BE dev was a native Russian speaker, so despite our fluency in English we started chatting in Russian now and then. Our conversations were meaningful and respectful (unlike those held by our predominantly Italian sales team who would shout out words like "cazzo"). We didn't mean to exclude anyone either, we only used Russian talking about stuff we wouldn't immediately share with everone in the first place - just because junior devs do not have to participate in the discussions about architecture design. Still, a junior dev from the US felt intimidated hearing our mother tongue so she asked our manager to introduce "English only" policy in this German company. She could not pass the probation period (was too busy doing gymnastics directly in the middle of the office space) and left the company, but the policy remained. Sure I don't have an answer to your question, but may I ask you: what's wrong with you? How do you think, does your attitude have something to do with xenophobia?
Seems like you might hold some resentment towards her, and that you're not so self aware about alienating colleagues.
If she felt like the right choice was to bring it up with management, it would seem fairly clear that she felt you were speaking Russian often enough that it would be an imposition to communicate with you, in a way that's quite common in Berlin and in Berlin startups. Though obviously not as much as German, it would be the common crossover language.
If you're senior and they're junior, part of your job is mentorship, and you should be making it as easy as possible to consult with more experienced people if necessary.
Those are the general principles I've always followed, and would do so regardless of whether they seemed incompetent or not. You need to be able to set your ego aside.
You are making too many assumptions about the nature of our conversations just in a single comment.
Imagine a situation: a newly joined junior dev is given a task to implement a web scraper.
Meanwhile, senior devs sitting beside her start discussing AWS bills for the previous month, pretty much in a casual way.
Do you think she should a) be given a chance to participate in this discussion b) carry on with her task, asking senior devs of what's unclear when needed?
And she has no way to know you are talking about AWS bills as she doesn't understand the language. Its intimidating, think from someone else's point of view.
No it's not. If my current boss is talking German fast enough, I can barely understand. Whenever he's talking with the legal team he's using German. This is a clear indication to me that my participation is unneeded (altough I do communicate with our lawyers on variety of subjects). Moreover, I think overhearing other people's conversations is impolite.
Maybe to _you_, don’t assume other people are the same way.
Along my whole career path (I’m a senior now) I’ve always been curious about the high-level technical stuff and took every opportunity to listen to knowledgeable people.
I think there’s a term for it: incidental knowledge transfer.
You might be stripping that person of the opportunity to grow, or maybe just to hear about something interesting for them to follow up on later.
I find reducing distraction is best served by providing sufficient means for a person to isolate oneself physically. If you feel like the conversation is a private one between yourself and another, the correct approach is not to speak in a different language. Not only does that not scale, it only solves your problem, you don't get to decide how the junior feels about it, and neither do they.
If you're a senior, you should have been a junior at some point, so I'd put the question back to you. Do you feel like sitting next to two people speaking in a completely different language would eliminate distraction? For me, I'd still be getting the noise of you speaking, but then I'd also be wondering why two members of my team have openly excluded me from a conversation happening in my presence. It doesn't encourage me to try and do better, and it makes your duties opaque. The way you describe it also sounds rather imbued with infantilism; "don't worry what we're chatting about, just type your little code while we do important grown up stuff".
Would you have been open to her asking you to stop if she felt that was ruining her productivity? It really just seems like a barrier that isn't necessary and shouldn't be there, waving it away as though they should have different feelings about it.
> Would you have been open to her asking you to stop if she felt that was ruining her productivity
Most definitely yes. But she never really shared with us what she felt. So when I heard from my boss she wasn't OK with us talking Russian I was like: WTF, how doesn't she understand she has a privilege to speak her native language at the office while most of the employees have to resort to the silly form of English they learnt at school?
Xenophobia is literally a "fear of unkown".
What I meant to say is that one could rationalize irrational fear of unknown speech with this feeling of exclusion, but could it be it's just uncommon sounds and intonations that make you feel uncomfortable?
I've mentioned Italian sales for this very reason: facing a different culture would naturally raise questions within you:
- are they talking shit behind my back?
- do they have something against me?
this all depends on your levels of paranoia and xenophobia.
As a person coming from a vastly monocultural society I used to feel this, too.
I believe the solution to this is being open for everyone and overcoming xenophobic sentiments and by no means complaining to the boss.
It's literally a "fear of foreigners". It was possible to use the adjective ξένος to call something strange, but that's not the sense used in the word, or the most common meaning of ξένος.
Based on the dictionary entries (see https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=cenos&la=greek#... ), it does not appear to have been possible to use ξένος to describe something as unknown. There is a related sense, "ignorant [of ...]", but that would describe the person who isn't familiar with something, not the thing that is unfamiliar to a person.
For "fear of the unknown", you'd presumably want something like "agnostophobia".
> Completely outa the blue based on what came before.
Not really; what came before is a story about how he'd talk with his friend in the office they shared, and then he condemns the OP for sharing the apparent American opinion that that kind of thing needs to be banned. The line from one to the other isn't exactly obscure.
I personally think they should be invited so they can learn and participate. If you want to reserve decision making responsibility for the seniors, that’s fine.
Regardless of whether juniors attend “senior” meetings or not, seniors should be transparent with juniors by showing them exactly how they should be operating —especially around operational subjects. Using language which isn’t common to all team members (whether Russian, English or any other language) is not the way to build a healthy team of people, in my experience.
And I think they should be given the option to attend all other meetings too, maybe with the exclusion of those that are more business oriented like discussing the vision for the team with management, etc. It has to stay efficient.
Otherwise, how do you want your junior developers to not be junior at some point?
It's good that you've mentioned efficiency.
How do you think, if junior devs would have to take part in every tech conversation, scheduled or not, when would they do their job?
> And I think they should be given the option to attend all other meetings too,
Surely we had numerous meetings altogether, she wasn't excluded.
But if every engineer would be given the right to attend every meeting, this would pretty much degrade to everyone just holding meetings all day long.
> I wouldn't want to work for your company.
Thanks for sharing! There are quite a few companies that follow your vision, I wish you good luck in your career.
GP isn't talking about meetings, where some dedicated time and space is spent to discuss a certain topic.
I have two policies for casual work-related discussions:
- discussions should have outcomes
- it shouldn't exclude anyone (not the same as: it should include anyone!)
...and a simple policy for non-work related discussions:
- feel free to chat about private topics however and to whomever you prefer
So:
- try to schedule meetings for important things and make anyone that could/wants to learn from it feel included
- if it's just casually pondering about architectural things and there is an outcome, you are obliged to provide a non-exlusive summary to the other team members (and should be able to give a reason on why this discussion was taking place exclusive to others like it did)
- and, if there isn't an outcome, the discussion wasn't worth its time and there shouldn't be a need to involve anybody else
I've also seen this a ton in Berlin startups, although mostly French or Spanish.
You can't realistically ban people from speaking their native language to each other (nor should you try), however I can understand the feeling of exclusion it creates, not sure what the solution is.
No. Its not total power generatian its only nuclear energy's share of electricity generation in Germany from 2000 to 2020.
From 2000 to 2009, 6 years were below 30%, 5 years below 28% and 2 years below 27%, with a low of 25.9% and a high of 32.1%. If you take the 32.1% as the maximum value with 100%, that is a little over 20% fluctuation with a clear, negative trend.
> And the last point. NATO is the mechanism for securing the U.S. presence in Europe. If NATO is liquidated, there will be no such mechanism in Europe. We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.
> We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.
This was a discussion in prelude to the signing of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany [1]. Baker's is a statement of understanding the
"Soviet Union [and] other European countries'" position, not an agreement--not even the hint of one. None of it made it into the final Treaty. Lots of ideas were mooted and abandoned in that transcript; it's revisionist to fixate on that one. (As, again, Gorbachev himself publicly admitted.)
Also, immediately following that statement, Baker says that he does not "have the Germans’ agreement to this approach," and that what he has relayed is "an account of this approach," holding that "maybe something much better can be created." Two men discussing ideas in pursuit of an agreement, which was drafted days and signed months thereafter.
You have claimed that "Gorbachev has publicly admitted he has no memory of it". This record of preliminary talks with Baker published by Gorbachev Foundation proves the opposite. There's no question this document has no legal bearing, but it's definitely more than just an allegation to say the US have fooled poor Gorbi.
> This record of preliminary talks with Baker published by Gorbachev Foundation proves the opposite
The idea was discussed. Nobody disputes that. Gorbachev disputes there was agreement. A position the transcript supports.
It’s like if two people are negotiating a price; one says 5, the other acknowledges hearing five and proposes 3, and then they trade at 4. Twenty years later, one of their daughters calls foul because the buyer acknowledged hearing 5 but only paid 4. That is the imbecilic position this argument takes.
You're still missing my point: your claim about Gorbachov having no memories of NATO borders negotioations is false, the sole purpose of my comment was to debunk it. There's one thing I can agree with you though: this argument had really taken imbecilic position.
I remember how Konyok-Gorbunok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpWkJuXGQic was just driving me nuts, I was just 6 y. o. and couldn't handle the frustration from losing on the 3rd screen. This game was just inhumane, I've only seen 20-year olds being good at it.
There was popular demand for these flights. My father once flew with Tu-144 from Moscow to Alma-Ata because of some urgency. The distance between these two cities is about 4000 km which is comparable to the distance between London and New-York. By the time he used to be a student and since the flight was subsidized it costed him just 83 roubles, which is just 20 roubles more than a flight on an ordinary plane, according to wiki (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1%83-144#%D0%9A%D0%BE%...)
The goal of this project is to replace tundra with grasslands. And tundra isn't a forest really, it's quite the opposite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tundra
It's not just NLP, English is pretty bad as an intermediate language for translations from language A to language B.
If I try translating a Russian word "пружина" ("a mechanical spring") to German using Google translate, I end up with "Frühling", which in fact means "springtime".
This is an obvious artefact of transitive translatiion: Russian -> English -> German.
Providing context may help, but still translation to English strips important pieces of information.
I don't think this is inherent to English, or any other language (perhaps in more specific cases when there is no word with the similar meaning).
I think in general we pack a concept in a word and lose some information this way, so when you want to be precise with what you are saying you have to bring your definitions with you. Essentially with translation you take a concept and "pack" it in a word, then look for an equivalent packing in different language, then unpack. Naturally, this process is prone to losing information.
I cannot agree. Not only English seems to have many homonyms (the word "spring" alone has more than 2 meanings), its grammar is also somewhat primitive.
Let me bring one more example, this time another way around: Google Translate from German to Russian.
The verb "tragen" ("to wear") is translated as "износ" ("a wear") which is a noun. Using English we lose important knowledge: we have no clue what part of speech the word "tragen" is.
This isn't an issue for any considerably long fragment of text, it will be properly translated due to context analysis. Still if the text would be analyzed using German in the first place, this would become less of a problem.
You're confusing two separate things: linguistic complexity and ambiguity.
Linguistic complexity is hard to measure, but it's not hard to show that at least morphologically, English is undercomplex compared to many other languages.
This doesn't necessarily mean that English is more ambiguous, though. Unlike German, English typically has very rigid word order, so in the context of a sentence, you'll know if a specific word is a noun or a verb.
The problem here is that many NLP models inadequately capture syntactic structure.
> So you say you are able to guess from the word order what part of speech a particular word is. But with German you hardly need all this guessing.
Not really. It's not about guessing: in English, the part of speech really is mostly determined by its syntactic structure.
> If you compare two marginal examples: - English "time flies like an arrow" - German "Wenn Fliegen fliegen hinter Fliegen..."
Not sure what you're trying to say here. The English example is ambiguous, yes (and only strictly grammaticaly; semantically the meaning is clear, unless you're using it in the phrase "time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana", which is meant as a linguistic joke). It's also very easy to come up with examples of phrases or sentences that are ambiguous in German, or in any language for that matter. Here are some fun examples:
"Er liest das Buch seiner Schwester vor" (could either mean "he's reading the book to his sister" or "he's reading his sister's book to someone")
"der weiße Schimmel" ("white mould", or "white horse")
"wilde Tiere jagen" ("to hunt wild animals", or "wild animals are hunting")
and don't even get me started on the ambiguity of compound words or phrases with a genitive, where there are often tons of potential interpretations depending on the intended relationship between head and dependent noun.
And also the German example you gave (fully: "Wenn Fliegen hinter Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen nach", or "if flies fly behind flies, flies fly after flies") is a) another joke sentence nobody uses in practice, and b) is exactly a case where you can only distinguish the part of speech (and the grammatical case) of a word from the syntactic structure and not from its morphology, something you claimed doesn't happen in German, but here it clearly does.
Look, you may make a case that it's easier for English sentences to be ambiguous than for some other languages, but I would need to see some good data before I believed that claim, because it's just not something that is immediately obvious.
I still think you're missing my point, although I am impressed by your German skills ("der Schimmel" is BTW just a homonym, it's hardly related to the topic of syntactic ambiguity).
> is a) another joke sentence nobody uses in practice, and b) is exactly a case where you can only distinguish the part of speech (and the grammatical case) of a word from the syntactic structure and not from its morphology, something you claimed doesn't happen in German, but here it clearly does.
I didn't make such a strong claim. All I wanted to say in German syntactic ambiguities are much less of a problem than in English. I've brought two anecdotal evidences to let you compare possible ambiguities in both of them, these two are indeed nothing but jokes.
But let's take a closer look at them once again.
a) "Time flies like an arrow": the word "time" can be 1) a noun 2) an adjective 3) a verb in declarative form 4) a verb in imperative form. This gives us a factor of 4 on the very first word of the sentence.
b) "Wenn Fliegen hinter Fliegen fliegen" - ambiguitity exists just between "fliegen" as a verb and "Fliegen" as a plural noun, thus the "ambiguity factor" of the word "f/Fliegen" is just 2.
> but I would need to see some good data before I believed that claim, because it's just not something that is immediately obvious.
>> I think in general we pack a concept in a word and lose some information this way, so when you want to be precise with what you are saying you have to bring your definitions with you. Essentially with translation you take a concept and "pack" it in a word, then look for an equivalent packing in different language, then unpack. Naturally, this process is prone to losing information.
This is a plausible description of how humans perform translation, but it does not apply to machine translation, because we have no good way to represent the meaning of a word other than with the word itself. Consequently machine translation systems can't distinguish between different meanings of the same word and instead try to produce a correct translation by relying on frequency-based heuristics: faced with two likely translations of a word, a system will try to determine the context of the word (in terms of its collocation with other words) and then assign to the word the meaning it has in the context that happens to be the most common according to its training dataset. Clearly, that is like "flying blind"; sometimes it will work, sometimes it will fail and there's no way to predict beforehand which.
The comment above gave the "spring" example, my routine example is asking Google Translate to translate Greek "χελιδόνι" (the bird, swallow) to French and getting "avaler" (the verb, to swallow) instead of the correct "hirondelle", again because translation goes from Greek to French via English, introducing ambiguity about the intended meaning of "swallow" that does not exist in either Greek or French. Note that this doesn't happen when the word "χελιδόνι" is used in a sentence (e.g. "ένα το χελιδόνι" translates to "un l'hirondelle", which is ungrammatical and nonsensical but at least gets the right noun), but it's a good test to show that Google Translate is really incapable of recognising the meaning of words and so cannot use such information to make translations. Note that the same goes for machine translation in general, i.e. Google Translate is a state of the art system.
I think it is inherent to English at least in degree.
Reading translated books from Polish to Spanish or Russian to Spanish conveys a lot more information, than reading the same book in their English translation.
There could be multiple factors I think, like: your language skill level, translation quality, "closeness" of languages, psychological predisposition towards your native language.
Depending on the form of the thing you are translating it can be simply impossible to translate properly (like poetry).
I'm currently reading English translation of "Black Obelisk" which I believe is written in German and it isn't any worse than Russian translation (my native language) to me.
In any case, what was originally asserted is that English is somehow worse than other languages as a "transitional" translation language for words or simple phrases, so I argued with that specific idea. Translating literary works is a subject of it's own and where the quality is much harder to measure.
Looking at translations as if they represent languages seems like a common beginner trope. -- I certainly made that mistake.
Funny that the upstream commenter essentially praises Spanish as superior to English, Spanish being the language I dismissed as less expressive than English when I was a noob.
A bad Netflix or literary Spanish translation, for example, is full of frustrating ambiguity ('who is the antecedent of "su" here? "Bajó"? Who bajó?? At least in English we have to use "he" or "she"!'). And, with experience, you realize that native Spanish writers will keep things disambiguated, it's just crappy translation shortcuts that don't. And trying to compare translations is only an exercise in comparing translators.
I've met several Germans who spoke Russian fluently, none of them has really mastered the instrumental case, not even a friend of mine who worked at the German embassy in Moscow. Although you might say it's a minor grammar difference, this particular grammar case seems hard to grasp for people who are not accustomed to it through their native language.
Also, from my personal experience, quite a few Germans who learnt Russian had a real struggle understanding the concept of perfective/imperfective aspect.