我是中国人

Discuss technical or other issues relating to programming the Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom, or compatible systems. See the NESdev wiki for more information.

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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

Bregalad wrote:Nooo ! Not keeping everything in english would be a catastrophe.
It's already not fully in english, with the japanese and chinese forums. I'm just seeing what is fair and what is not. I would probably not make use of any of the other language forums, but I'm sure many would like. There are many registered user and guests that do not post, maybe because they're not confident about their english.
I don't even know if I'd be able to speak about NESdev in french. I mean english is a perfect language for everything that have to do with computers, programming, electronics, math, etc... and for me french is for everything else. I have a lot of trouble speaking about computer-related stuff in french, since a lot of standard terms are in english and stupid people want to translate untranslatable stuff in french, making crap.
I feel the same way about english and portuguese. Often when I'm sketching programming stuff people complain that I do it in english, 'cause I always do. Also, people I work with usually complain that I name variables, functions, etc. in english. I have a really hard time reading computer material in portuguese, it just doesn't make sense. Maybe because I learned it all in english, and when I see what people turned the expressions into it just looks stupid. I always laugh at teachers in college pronouncing words like "procedure" using the rules of portuguese. Plus, this kind of material is usually badly translated, you will always find many errors in translated computer books.
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Bregalad
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Post by Bregalad »

If I do a programm with all variables and labels in french, you're doing it in portugueese, and someone else do it in english, not only it will have bad and confusing labels, but exanging programms will be confusing to impossible, because you won't understand each other doccumentation (exept the english one).
If everyone does everything in english, it makes the life of everyone easier. I like comment and label everythig in english, and this makes less trouble than doing it in french where half of the stuff would still have to be kept in english for "impossible-to-translate" purposes, so better is to keep 100% english.
I had some trouble for example I spell "scrool" instead of "scroll" everywhere, but with a bit of effort this can be fixed.
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Lloyd Gordon
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Post by Lloyd Gordon »

I speak English so I'm biased. However it is good to have a "Universal language" as there are so few NESDev fanatics that if we start splitting up by language we will individually miss a lot. The good thing about English is that if you stick to a NES technical problems you can be understood pretty easily even with grammar, spelling and syntax that are far from perfect. Still I can understand someone wanting to use their own language. By the way, are all Chinese written languages the same or do we need Cantonese, Mandarin and Peking Chinese forums?
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Re: English

Post by WedNESday »

Lloyd Gordon wrote:By the way, are all Chinese written languages the same or do we need Cantonese, Mandarin and Peking Chinese forums?
Yes.

Edit: Yes, as in, they are the same.
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Post by Celius »

Bregalad wrote: I had some trouble for example I spell "scrool" instead of "scroll" everywhere, but with a bit of effort this can be fixed.
You know, that's funny you mention that, because that's one of the things I noticed about your posts when I first came here. But yeah, I think that multiple language forums would cause catastrophe, because I think it'd just turn into a discussing-the-language-in-english forum. I've noticed in the FCdev forum, people that post there (including myself) like to talk about the Japanese language itself rather than FCdev stuff. I think it'd just be a mess. And there are few people interested in NESdev that speak french or portuguese, like Bregalad was saying. I think it'd just result in a bunch of people starting new threads asking how to say something, and it'd just be a waste of space. I also think it'd be spammed alot.
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kyuusaku
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Post by kyuusaku »

That's why there is a "General Stuff" forum, there you may discuss whatever.

I have a suggestion: why not make a single "International" (non-English allowed) forum where people may post in whichever language they choose? Here on-topic responders should reply in the OP's language. Perhaps the forum subtitle should say French/Spanish/Portuguese/Chinese/Japanese welcome in their respective languages. This way should another language come along, it can just be added to the subtitle, and it's clear the language is understood by someone.
augnober
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Re: English

Post by augnober »

WedNESday wrote:
Lloyd Gordon wrote:By the way, are all Chinese written languages the same or do we need Cantonese, Mandarin and Peking Chinese forums?
Yes.

Edit: Yes, as in, they are the same.
Well.. This could use some clarification because both 'yes' or 'no' would be misleading.

In writing, there are Simplified Chinese characters and Traditional Chinese characters. In the 1950's or so, mainland China took the existing Chinese characters and developed simplified characters. Elsewhere, simplified characters weren't adopted, and so they're still using traditional.

Many Chinese in China can read conversational text written in traditional Chinese (in part because of imported karaoke and movies which are sometimes only subtitled with traditional characters), but aren't entirely fluent with it and have never written it. They never formally studied it, they can't type it, and they certainly can't write it. As for people who learned traditional characters.. I think it's a bit harder for them. In my experience, they can read the general grammatical structure but stumble on a couple words per sentence, which makes it a pretty big hassle for them. Those who speak Mandarin can become decent at typing simplified characters on a computer within a month or two (once they learn how pronunciation is romanized they can type the pronunciation they're familiar with and then see a limited set of choices that they can guess from), but very few of them have done it.

Worse yet, you can't just change your browser settings to switch between viewing the two. There's no one-to-one mapping between them. Converting between the two is a hard problem comparable to translation. In short, at best a forum that doesn't use their native characters is a little painful to read and they understand that if they ever posted, they'd be using their own native characters which others may not be able to read.

As for speech and how it relates to writing.. I'm not sure. People use traditional characters to write Cantonese, whereas with Mandarin it depends where they grew up. I've been told that Cantonese writing has some differences due to different vocabulary and such. I don't know how major the difference is. Amongst people who write traditional characters, I think Mandarin and Cantonese people probably prefer to use their own forums despite the shared characters, and only just occasionally venture into the other languages' site if they've got a reason. I could be wrong though.

Anyway.. If what you're looking for is a single standard, the consensus is that the movement is toward Mandarin + Simplified Chinese. 1billion+ people is a pretty big headstart. For Chinese, I'd just make a Simplified Chinese forum (or, 'China', as it is now) and leave it at that.
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Bregalad
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Post by Bregalad »

If you need to change something, "international" would be better, so if people REALLY don't know english they may post here and possibly get an answer from someone that knows both english and another language.
For example, Tokumaru would answer to all posts in portugeese, I'd do posts in French, etc...

But I think this isn't the goal. The FCDev forum was here because japaneese is where the NES and most NES games have been invented. English has the particularity that everyone speaks it a little, and that is the universal language for computer-related stuff. All other languages doesn't have the particularity that japaneese and english has.
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Memblers
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Post by Memblers »

tokumaru wrote: I don't know the actual numbers of users from each country, but if there are many people using the same language, I think that justifies a new forum. Since other 2 different languages already have one, that is.
Here's how to find out (just for the main page though, so it's potential forum-users):
http://www.webstats4u.com/s?tab=1&link= ... 75&cou=all

I think it'd be great to have a lot of different language forums. It's not to split people up, but to get new people to come around who wouldn't post otherwise.

I would assume there's people like myself, who have little to no trouble reading posts in another language (using translation software or otherwise) but are uncomfortable writing in other languages. I think it's OK to reply to any threads in english, as long as you understand the discussion and are willing to follow-up. A lot of answers will be in 6502 assembly anyways, that's the common language around here.

One big reason I did never opened a lot of other language sections is kinda cosmetic.. it'd make the main forum index larger (it's now 3 page-down keys on my screen, to see if there's new posts). And the Japanese-language area went unused for years at a time, everyone was just posting in english. It gets more responses.

If there is to be another forum made for more languages, what would be next? I'd guess Spanish. I like the international forum idea though.
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zgh4000
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Post by zgh4000 »

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Quietust
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Post by Quietust »

Demo 1 sort of works, though some of the graphics are missing.
Demo 2 crashes immediately, jumping off into $6000 (which contains absolutely nothing on an NROM board).

Also, if you want to post in this particular forum, you'll need to use English so the rest of us can understand. Chinese posts are fine over in "NESdev China".
Last edited by Quietust on Thu Jun 01, 2006 5:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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zgh4000
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Re: 我是中国人

Post by zgh4000 »

augnober wrote:
zgh4000 wrote:我是中国人,爱好NES游戏开发, 第一次来这个论坛, 做了几个小的DEMO.
Chinese:
大家在这里只用英语或者日语(能写日语的地方在“FCDev”里边)。但是在这里可能有一些想学汉语的学生想跟中国游戏开发者聊天。麻烦你告诉我们,在哪里能用汉语聊天?(ie. 告诉我们一个好的汉语emulation论坛网址 - 你喜欢哪个论坛?) 谢谢

English:
Everyone here uses just English or Japanese (the place wherein you can write Japanese is "FCDev"). But there are probably a few students here who'd like to study Chinese and would like to talk with Chinese game (or emulation) developers. Please tell us, where can we speak Chinese? (ie. tell us the address of a good Chinese-language emulation forum -- Which forum do you like?) Thanks.

(I figure if there's any further Chinese here, it's probably best to make it quick and use it to jump out to a Chinese-language forum for further discussion. Personally, I'd like to find some good Chinese development forums as an interesting place to improve my Chinese.)
我不得不遗憾的告诉你,现在中国的FC游戏开发者很少,至少我没见到几个,现在人们一般开发GBA,NDS等等.
大部分FC爱好者喜欢汉化游戏.就是把外国的游戏翻译成中文游戏.
我是一个业余的FC游戏开发爱好者,还有,你的汉语说的很不错啊.
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zgh4000
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Post by zgh4000 »

Quietust wrote:Demo 1 sort of works, though some of the graphics are missing.
Demo 2 crashes immediately, jumping off into $6000 (which contains absolutely nothing on an NROM board).

Also, if you want to post in this particular forum, you'll need to use English so the rest of us can understand. Chinese posts are fine over in "NESdev China".
I understand that and I would say in English here. But my English is poor.
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tokumaru
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Post by tokumaru »

Memblers wrote:I like the international forum idea though.
That surelly is the way to let everyone post without cosmetically affecting the page. I like it too. This way you don't have to worry about what languages deserve a forum and things like that. People could just start a topic in whatever language they want. That's cool.
zgh4000 wrote:I understand that and I would say in English here. But my English is poor.
Don't worry about that. We're discussing programming here, not languages. It's just that you have a better chance of passing along the message if you use english, it does not have to be perfect. =)

Plus, you get to practice a little english here, and you'll get better and better at it.
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Post by tepples »

I agree with tokumaru: Don't worry about your English not being understood. Most of us grew up with Engrish (imperfect English as a foreign language) in cheaply translated NES games.
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