Comment by uticus

8 hours ago

> a proper "Engrish" instruction manual

At what point do the instruction manuals stop catering to Engrish and start focusing on 汉字?

5 comments

uticus

Recently I've bought a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress and its box and manual are 100% in Chinese. Google Translate took care of it.

Why did I buy a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress? It looks like all western brands decided to keep using NiMH batteries on their designs, and I really don't like my trimmers dying in the middle of a cut and me, now with a half-shaved beard, having to wait 12 hours for it to recharge. Xiaomi did something very revolutionary: used a Li-Ion battery.

ezst 2 hours ago

Interesting. I never cared about what my Japanese beard trimmer uses as battery, because whenever it dies on me (which is long after prominently lighting a red LED), it works instantly fine connected to the wall to let me finish my cut, and can take however long it wants to recharge after that ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

beng-nl 7 hours ago

I quite honestly fear this day. (But for other reasons, eg we might have to go to china for top conferences, universities, jobs, etc.).

immibis 1 hour ago

It's already here. All the best cheap microcontrollers have datasheets written purely in Chinese. Most Westerners don't use them because the datasheets are written purely in Chinese, and therefore, Western products with cheap microcontrollers use inferior ones.
Melonai 4 hours ago

I myself have been preparing for that day, learning simplified Mandarin and trying to expose myself to Chinese online presence. :)
I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare, but they are getting closer, and if that ever properly happens, I'm quite ready, and if not, at least I get a whole new language out of it and a better understanding of a huge culture that felt a lot more out of reach before.
For context, I'm from Russia, so maybe it's easier for me to trade one foreign hegemony for another than for many others..