Right, but I don't know what the odds are that "capable of passing in Dragon City" means she would have learned English - she might have been learning Mandarin as a second language instead, since the Yashou tribes seem to have their own languages.
Do you know how well the "everybody learns a little bit of Internet English" applies inside the Chinese firewalls? I've gotten the impression (based on both reading Language Log's China language updates & the issues AO3 has been having with communicating with Chinese users) that it's much less likely to learn good English just from living on the internet in China than in, say, Europe or India or South America. It's not that there are no English-language websites accessible (AO3 is visible there! So far!) but it's much easier (and safer) to mostly stick to Chinese spaces, and the Chinese-speaking internet is large enough and firewalled enough that you won't feel like you're missing anything.
So I'd expect Lin Jing to have some internet English, but not at the level of the brilliant ESL fans we're all used to interacting with regularly. And probably Lin Jing, Sang Zan, and Shen Wei all have at minimum technical English to the point that they can read an English-language paper in their specialist fields - I read something recently about how, increasingly, Chinese science in China is conducted in English, just because in English it's much easier to deal with all the newly-coined technical terms that are needed in fields like genetics and comp sci - but it's probably a very specialized and limited version of English that does not necessarily mean they could make small talk with a London policeman.
Zhao Yunlan probably speaks English exactly as well as he feels like speaking English, but he does not feel like speaking it well enough to be the Starling's translator. :D
How were language issues handled in the time travel sections? I still haven't made it that far. I suspect they ignored them though, right? Or was there some kind of official handwave that made it make sense that they could talk to each other across ten thousand years?
no subject
Right, but I don't know what the odds are that "capable of passing in Dragon City" means she would have learned English - she might have been learning Mandarin as a second language instead, since the Yashou tribes seem to have their own languages.
Do you know how well the "everybody learns a little bit of Internet English" applies inside the Chinese firewalls? I've gotten the impression (based on both reading Language Log's China language updates & the issues AO3 has been having with communicating with Chinese users) that it's much less likely to learn good English just from living on the internet in China than in, say, Europe or India or South America. It's not that there are no English-language websites accessible (AO3 is visible there! So far!) but it's much easier (and safer) to mostly stick to Chinese spaces, and the Chinese-speaking internet is large enough and firewalled enough that you won't feel like you're missing anything.
So I'd expect Lin Jing to have some internet English, but not at the level of the brilliant ESL fans we're all used to interacting with regularly. And probably Lin Jing, Sang Zan, and Shen Wei all have at minimum technical English to the point that they can read an English-language paper in their specialist fields - I read something recently about how, increasingly, Chinese science in China is conducted in English, just because in English it's much easier to deal with all the newly-coined technical terms that are needed in fields like genetics and comp sci - but it's probably a very specialized and limited version of English that does not necessarily mean they could make small talk with a London policeman.
Zhao Yunlan probably speaks English exactly as well as he feels like speaking English, but he does not feel like speaking it well enough to be the Starling's translator. :D
How were language issues handled in the time travel sections? I still haven't made it that far. I suspect they ignored them though, right? Or was there some kind of official handwave that made it make sense that they could talk to each other across ten thousand years?