Knowing What And How

There's something that has been bothering me and have been struggling with making a decision, till today. I had enough and I think it's time to clarify my position for future disputes.

If you're reading this, you know I'm only posting in English. I speak four languages but right at the beginning of my Hive "career" I decided to only use English as posting languages for several reasons. My main goal on Hive was to practice English and share my photo, this is why I started posting. This is the most popular and widely used language and most of you understand it.

As a content consumer and curator, only read and curate English or bilingual posts, knowing in most of the cases, when it comes to bilingual posts, one is translated using an app. When I comment, I do it in English, with a few exceptions. Sometimes we fool around with mipiano and use another language that only we understand and I guess I posted one or two comments in Italian on posts written on Italian, just for fun, but have never had the intention to post in any other language than English.

We have users from literally all over the world, posting in all possible and impossible languages, some translate their post into English to reach a larger audience, but mostly to get curators' attention and because community rules require it, which is fine. Without having any evidence, I suppose those translations are done by using an app, as I said earlier in this post.

Quite often I'm getting Spanish comments and up until now I've been translating the comments in order to be able to understand and reply, to avoid looking rude or give the impression that I don't respect those who are commenting, but I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm done!

If your mother tongue is Spanish, but you can read my post and are able to understand it to a degree to comment as well, I'm sure you can write your reply in English too. After all, my posts are usually between 700-800 words without the footer and the comments I get are way, way shorter. Once a Spanish commenter told me I can translate the comment as we have a bunch of possibilities (no sh*t!!!), but so can you, especially when you know I won't understand what you are saying because I don't speak the language. After all, the main reason you are commenting is to let me know what you think about the topic of the post, isn't it? This begs the question, then why are you commenting?

Most likely after this post I'll be labeled as entitled, full of myself and ... (I'm letting the list open for you), but let's move on from the online world, into the real word and take an example, of two people knowing each other but speaking two different languages. This happens almost everywhere in the world as people migrate and most countries are home to a lot of nationalities. Imagine two people having as mother tongue two different languages and each of them starts to speak their own language. How are they going to understand each other?

I'm part of a minority in my country, my mother tongue is different from the official language and even though law says we have the right to conduct official business in our own language, meaning administrations have to have clerks speaking the language, I don't throw tantrums if I can't exercise my right. I switch to the official language as my goal is to solve my problem, but to do so, I need the clerk to understand what I am saying.

Once upon a time there was a thing called etiquette.

Cambridge Discionary

This is not a written rule set in stone, it is an unwritten one and basically common sense, but not around here. Hive is not to blame here obviously, it's up to each individual how they conduct themselves, but it says a lot about the individual.

If you're not a teenager and you've had a job or two in your life, you know building connections is key in life and in order to do that, you need to be smart, speak nicely, use the right words and so on as it's in your best interest to capture the attention of your counterpart and make them like you.

On Hive all this doesn't matter. People comment on whatever language they speak, some can't even bother to write their own comment and use AI (as if we're interested in reading what a bot says), and there are those who come in and bruh everyone without exception, using some slang only they understand. Those who comment using a different language than the language of the post may know the poster will not understand what they are saying, but they do it anyway. Why? Because they don't care.

The latest that shocked me was a single word comment after a convo in English with a random user, that not only made no sense at all, but I could not find translation to it anywhere, not even AI could help me. I wrote back that I have no idea what that word means and therefore I'm ignoring it, just to be polite. This is when I was invited to a video call, to be explained what this word means in Persian ... 😳 I mean ... seriously?

This on a granular scale could look like I'm blowing a minuscule thing out of proportion, but this is more than that. It goes to show why, or better yet, makes you wonder why these people are commenting and how they are conducting themselves in life, how they are trying to achieve their goals.

Somehow all this comes down to education, or the lack of it to be precise, which can be blamed on your parents, who are responsible for your education till a certain age, but after that, it's on you. It's on you how you shape your future, how you learn new skills, learn to integrate yourself in different communities and so on, what connections you make and what you do to be better than yesterday.

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