Comments by "Angry Kittens" (@AngryKittens) on "Asian Boss" channel.

  1.  @arbs3ry  That's my point. People who don't speak a lingua franca tend to be more isolated from the rest of the world. English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Russian have the largest "reach" of speakers outside of their original country. It enables them to form connections outside their borders. While monolingual countries whose languages are not spoken outside their countries tend to have a smaller, inward-looking worldview. Your country, whether you admit it or not, has an authoritarian government. And authoritarian governments, in general, WANT that smaller inward-looking worldview. Which means either they physically limit interactions outside their countries (like North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, etc.), and/or they control the media and communications (like China, Brunei, Saudi Arabia, etc.). Note that I'm making a distinction between the Chinese people and Beijing. What you're doing now, may not be what Beijing wants in the long run. Especially under Xi. When you and I talk, as citizens of different countries. We recognize we're both just people. Even if I don't exactly like your current government. For the simple reason that we CAN communicate. Even though English is NOT our native languages. Now ask an average North Korean on their ideas on how the outside world and outside people are. And they'll likely say foreigners are all devils who want to destroy them and eat their babies, because that's all their government tells them. And they CAN'T communicate with the outside world to see for themselves. And that's exactly what the Kims want, so they can justify and hold on to their absolute power. It's why even just listening to K-Pop or watching K-dramas is a crime punishable by death in North Korea.
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  5. Taku Morisaki. Right. I'll remember that next time a Japanese person says "konpyuta" (computer) or "sarariman" (salary man) or "toraburu" (trouble). LOL. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai have a ton of loanwords from English. Especially for technological and scientific terms. You just don't recognize them because they're spelled natively. The only reason they don't code-switch is because they don't speak English widely. Meanwhile, Taglish is just a code-switching dialect. Similar to other code-switching dialects in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Hong Kong, etc. where mixing native languages with English is also very common. Are you also going to accuse them of not having a native language? LOL Similarly, there's Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea. Which is basically pidgin English. And you know why they speak it? Because there are 832 languages in PNG. The only way they can understand each other is with a common language. And the easiest is a variant of English. If you're curious, the Philippines has more than 170 native languages. Tagalog is NOT even the most widely spoken native language. That's part of the reason why English is popular. It's a common language that transcends ethnic groups. In contrast, Vietnam only has like 9, and virtually everyone speaks Vietnamese. Chinese has around 300. But given that Chinese has a system of writing that can be understood without having to speak the same language, they do not need a real common spoken language. Regardless, minority languages in China are dying because Mandarin is slowly killing them. And yet you accuse us of not having our own language. lel
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  8. @L L And forcing us to speak in Tagalog isn't? As I've mentioned, most Filipinos (around 70 million people) are not Tagalog. For most of us, Tagalog is NOT our mother tongue. The decades of Tagalog being taught in Filipino schools is actually the main reason for the erosion and even extinction of some of the native languages in the Philippines, not English. That's the reason in the first place why so many Filipinos eventually came to prefer English. As a sort of protest against the imposition of Tagalog over our own mother tongues. It's similar to the situation in Indonesia, where many of the minority languages are slowly dying as Bahasa is imposed over them. Or in Japan, where languages like Okinawan are the last of the languages to die as they are replaced by the overwhelmingly more prevalent Japanese. Or Vietnam, where Vietnamese is similarly well on its way to erasing all other other minority languages. And so on and so forth. As a foreigner, they will all sound suitably "Asian" and "beautiful" to you, so you won't even realize that it's happening. As far as "killing" mother-tongues go, English is far from being the deadliest in Asia. I'd rather we speak "ugly" if it means we retain our diversity, than speak "beautiful" but end up becoming a monolingual culture. Code-switching is not pretty, but it allows the continued use (and thus survival) of minority languages. A non-Asian example of this is the use of Spanglish among Chicanos in the US. Sure it sounds weird, but it means that even if they've become very much Americanized, they still speak their native Spanish in addition to English.
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  42. "Negro"/"Negra" in the Philippines is not a racial slur. The words are Spanish originally. They mean "black" and is used in exactly the same way as "black" is used in the US. The word is also used in Latin America and Spain with no negative connotations, unlike in the US. "N***er" however is derogatory, but given that the Philippines has no history of African slavery, it's merely a "borrowed" slang street kids get from American movies and hiphop culture. They have no idea about the history behind that word. Merely that it's something white Americans seem to like calling black people to make them mad. So they do it. Kids are cruel that way. Adult Filipinos (generally) do not do that. Because most people are aware of racism in the US, and there are a few half-black celebrities in the Philippines (Jaya, apl.d.ap, etc.). Plus the general non-confrontational culture of the Philippines. In contrast to China for instance where grown-ass people will literally touch your skin to see if the color comes off, or people will run away when they see a black person, because they have very little knowledge of what goes on in western countries. She's a Filipino who grew up in the Philippines. Her own perceptions are that of Filipinos, not of Black Americans, hence why she doesn't really get that angry about it. It's no worse than being teased by other kids for being fat or being poor, etc. It's sad, but it's really not a racial thing. There is no malevolent intent behind the words, in contrast to when you hear it in the US. It's just kids being cruel to kids who look different.
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