The flags are something that have been used by sites for years, a lot of people are used to it. I speak English but am Canadian, I know to look for the Union Jack if I want English and the French flag for France. Perhaps it's not as simple in other places, but I really don't think it's a big issue. A lot of people can figure it out with a very minimal level of thought/remembering prior experiences. The Union Jack for instance could represent Gaelic, Welsh or Cornish, but most people know it means English. To me, I rather liked seeing the flags, I thought it was a nice touch and added to the look and feel (rather than writing out the language name in subtitle font).

Who cares? Focus on the central point. DH6. http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I'm sorry, I don't see how I'm disagreeing with an awesome Show HN. I was trying to provide feedback to improve UX. I like this, I want it to succeed, I personally know English teachers who can recommend it to their students.

The use of flags to disambiguate languages is a trivial point because it's impact on the success or failure of the idea is minimal.

This. A lot of European countries are either multilingual or have large minorities that speak another country's language natively.

Pardon if this is a dumb question, but what is it that people mean on HN when they say "This." ?? I've seen it a few times now and I still don't understand.

It's a piece of internet slang meaning "I strongly agree" and it adds just as much to the conversation (that is, nothing).

It's shorthand for 'I agree with what this guy said'. An alternative is '+1'

They're agreeing with the parent.

It's the same thing as "+1". ;-)

Even better - Europe is effectively comprised of multiple (rather smooth) dialect continua, with national states pretending to have distinct languages, while the actual language situation is much more blurry.

but in this case it's about the written language and less about verbal dialects.

Chinese and Cantonese are representable by the same written language.

Sorry, no.

> "Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese, the two languages are not mutually intelligible because of pronunciation, grammatical, and also lexical differences" from (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese).

Fluent and literate Cantonese are not automatically fluent and literate in Mandarin. In the same way fluent and native English speakers are not automatically fluent and literate in German, despite using the same alphabet and sharing some vocabulary and grammar.