> Translating docs and such to other languages is always good, but not crucial. The reason is: you need to know english anyway, because there is and always will be useful stuff written in english, so people who are crying over absence of russian docs instead of learning english (unfortunately there are plenty of them) aren't really worth paying attention, because they aren't really in trouble, they are just lazy.
Sadly, not everybody can have a good linguistic education from the go, it depends from a lot of factors, not just laziness.
> Why english and not chinese? Because english is fairly simple.
The notion of linguistic simplicity it's just bogus. English is simple for who? It depends from what is your mother tongue. English for a Dutch speaker is like super easy. But for a Chinese it is quite hard.
I'd say that Chinese is honestly a harder language because it is filled with too much idiosyncrasy. I think most Chinese people cannot decipher the meaning or pronunciation of new Chinese words they've never seen before.
And if they've forgotten how to write a character, then they are doomed without outside reference. I can use a word in English I've only seen or heard once in a novel event, and have a hope of using it passably.
Even looking things up in the dictionary is hard... for Chinese people. I've seen Chinese parents pride themselves on how skillfully their children use the dictionary. That's because it's hard and worthy of pride; the radical system is so random and unnecessary from an outside view. Chinese is worthy of the reputation that perl has had, and for the exact same reasons: it's capriciously idiosyncratic and ruthless to non-native speakers.
I'd also note that non-native language acquisition has been looked at by the US military, and I'm sure across the world, and I doubt that all languages are rated equally. I'm quite sure that Arabic and Chinese rate as very hard languages.
I suspect that english has been made easier for non-native speakers by a rich recent history of english being spoken by non-native speakers (particularly in America). This may have broken down expectations about the language that native english speakers have.
For example, a native english speaker will not have much difficulty at all when they encounter an Russian who speaks english as a second language and frequently miss or misuse articles. Although the native Russian speaker is technically using the english language incorrectly, native english speakers have adapted to expect and tolerate a very high rate of errors. This lowers the level of language perfection that is necessary to effectively communicate in english.
Speakers of languages without this sort of recent tradition of non-native speakers may find grammatical errors more jarring, because they have been exposed to them less often.
> Sadly, not everybody can have a good linguistic education from the go
Totally true! I hadn't, for instance. I had Internet. And while I believe my English is very far from perfect, at least you can understand me.
> simple for who
It's very common to hear about "simple != easy" on HN (maybe because of R. Hickey, idk) and this is just the case.
Easiness = Familiarity (subjective)
Simplicity = "Does/is one thing" (objective)
English has simple grammar compared to most of languages I know, probably compared to most of non-constructed languages at all. It has simple writing system compared to Chinese, objectively. Even "lolcats English" can be understood quite easily, if you know English to some extent. You cannot write "lolcats Chinese", only pinyin (or kana, for Japanese). If some Japanese shows you a visit-card with his name in kanji only, you often have to ask him (if it's not some really common name/surname) how that is pronounced (even if you have seen that kanji before, because there are many variants of pronunciation!). I don't know what's about Chinese, but declension/conjugation in Japanese has far more cases than in Modern English (although probably can be said to be "more regular"). Russian declension is objectively more complicated than English (almost non-existent!). In it's turn, Chinese pronunciation is pretty hard to master if you don't have concept of tones in your language. I won't say anything about English this time, but Chinese pronunciation is objectively more complicated than Japanese, for instance. That means, if you speak Chinese, you won't have very hard time repeating what Japanese says, but not otherwise.
The concept of "simplicity" is so not bogus that even have been made attempts to invent some language, that will be easy (because it's simple!) to speak for everyone (esperanto). But as there are many people that don't really care for defragmentation, enlightenment, modernism and stuff like that — so, esperanto is dead now. Maybe it's for the better. Anyway, English doesn't have to be invented, and it's fine, although maybe not perfect as "the universal language". Fine is fine, that's what I'm saying.
Sadly, not everybody can have a good linguistic education from the go, it depends from a lot of factors, not just laziness.
> Why english and not chinese? Because english is fairly simple.
The notion of linguistic simplicity it's just bogus. English is simple for who? It depends from what is your mother tongue. English for a Dutch speaker is like super easy. But for a Chinese it is quite hard.