Digital Immersion

Series: Journey to the BCH East
Part 2

First off, I wanted to thank our community for the constructive feedback and kind words. Shout out to @imkeshav on Twitter who suggested I follow Cypto Cindy. Also, @nyusternie had an interesting idea to use matrix.org to bridge public web feeds, I’ll need to spend some time to think about it.

Anyway, I’m attempting the following with the help of our community over the next six months:
1. Improve my language skills to the point where I can assimilate into the BCH Mandarin Community
2. Assimilate into the BCH Mandarin Community
3. Figure out ways in which sustainable, economically incentivized communication can be established between the Mandarin speaking and English-speaking BCH communities. My gut is telling me if more direct commerce is established between companies across the BCH language border, information asymmetry will reduce dramatically.
4.  Find myself an economically sustainable business model along the way

What I’ve been doing Over The last week

I’ve been spending a lot of time slowly reading BCH mandarin posts from Mandarin BCH Thought Leaders and BCH Companies on Weibo using the Zhongwen chrome extension. I have also been repeatedly going through sections of this article and while I read the BCH mandarin content, I’m playing this same bitcoin introductory explanation video in the background on repeat for hours on end. I’m doing this because I want to naturally acquire the proper pronunciations of BCH mandarin terminology instead of learning them forcefully. When you think of a baby learning a new language, mothers just repeat the same words to them over and over again like a broken record. Having said that, I do use Google Translate to figure out the pronunciations of some words, but I find that copying and pasting phrases I don’t understand into YouTube and just watching the videos that come up is more immersive as it engages more senses.

As a result, I’m now able to pick out, type and say basic crypto words like 比特币 (bitcoin), 区块链 (blockchain), 算力 (hashrate), e.t.c. Btw, bitcoin cash is 比特币现金 in mandarin, but the mandarin videos I’ve seen just refer to it as BCH. Anyway, I’ll put a list of BCH related Mandarin words of the week with pronunciations at the bottom of this article.

Lastly, I’ve set the default language of my S9 plus to mandarin and added mandarin as a typing option on my phone as well. Using it is not very difficult because I perform most functions instinctively on my phone anyway. I briefly switch language to English if I’m stuck trying to perform a task.

Apology Time

So, I saw the Jiang Zhuoer livestream where he interviewed Jihan Wu the day Jiang Zhuoer posted it on Weibo. However, I could only make out words here and there. I know there were mentions of bitcoin, bitcoin cash, America, China, equity markets, but that was all I could make out. There were no mandarin captions, so I couldn’t use the Zhongwen chrome extension to translate what they were saying. I also tried using the Google Translate app to transcribe and translate the interview. The problem is that the app is designed to pick up audio of one or two sentences and not an entire interview. Also, a lot of the google translations make no sense. I’ve listed an example of Google translating Jihan below:

“The inner class of each module in our family cannot be suppressed.”

Yea, OK thanks Google.

Upcoming Mandarin BCH Challenges

I can’t translate videos in real time, but to be fair that is a pretty damn complicated task for a beginner. Gotta learn to walk before I learn to run. Instead, I will create and stagger challenges that become milestones for my progress. Off the top of my head, translating BCH Mandarin social media text and comments is a steppingstone to communicate in an intelligible manner with the BCH Mandarin community.

On a philosophical note, if I learn to do everything I do as a BCH community member but in Mandarin, will I cross an inflection point where I become a part of the BCH Mandarin community? If I’m able to explain to native mandarin nocoiners how to download a BCH wallet in Mandarin, learn to buy and sell BCH in Mandarin and shitpost in Mandarin online, do I pass the Turing Test? Let’s find out! Till next week.

再见,
Marcel Chuo

BCH Mandarin Words of the Week

比特币 - Bǐtè bì, bitcoin
区块链 - Qū kuài liàn, blockchain
算力 - Suàn lì, hashrate
比特币现金 - Bǐtè bì xiàn jīn, bitcoin cash (Mandarin speaking community also calls it BCH afaik)

Read part 1 here

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