Earth System Science: Sorry, I only speak English
One of my main goals here was to meet Chinese researchers: a rare
opportunity. But there has been a significant language barrier to this task,
which I confess I wasn’t expecting. I naively thought that the younger
generation of scientists would be chirping away in English over their
posters, but this hasn’t quite proven to be the case. For most, their
command of English is admirable – and infinitely better than their foreign
colleagues’ command of Chinese. But it is obvious at this conference, which
is almost entirely about forging communication links between different
research fields and countries, that language is still a barrier to those
goals.