Ordinary Gweilo

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You want English? Learn Chinese!

If you live in Greater China you will know that stuff (phones, tablets, etc.) often comes with Chinese as the default setting.  And the (pitifully) few Chinese characters I might recognize are nowhere near enough to navigate through the menus to find the option to change to English.  

Yes it’s my own fault for buying a tablet with Chinese Windows.  I was in a hurry and I assumed that it would be easy to switch to English.  Indeed (with some help), I changed the primary language to English. 

Then I downloaded Evernote Touch, and it’s all in Chinese.  What?  I couldn’t find the menu in the application, and it turns out you have to do something in Windows and then all is (reasonably) well.  Anyway, waste of time because it’s rubbish.  Back to the normal (desktop version) of the program, which is fine except that there’s no way to do a right-click.  

This is strange because in Google Chrome you can do a right-click (hold your finger and up pops a menu). 

But back to the point – is it too much to ask that there should always be a button or high-level menu in English, Spanish, or French that takes you to language selection?  

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2 responses to “You want English? Learn Chinese!”

  1. Anon avatar
    Anon

    Depends. Would you also be happy to have buttons in Chinese, Spanish and French to take you to the language selection dialog in every single English-language app you own?
    After all, the Chinese language is far, far more common as a native language than English, and so is Spanish. Hence it seems utterly unfair to expect English to be catered to, but not to feel one has to do the same in return.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
    Far more people are (potentially) inconvenienced by the lack of a Chinese button than of an English one…

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  2. Chris avatar
    Chris

    It’s a fair point but if you can understand English you have a reasonable chance of being able to navigate menus in languages such as Spanish, French or Italian. But you would have close to zero chance of understanding the Chinese or Japanese characters.
    My biggest complaint here is that Microsoft haven’t done a very good job of allowing you to change the language that is used in “Modern” (Windows 8) applications.

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