Heh, deepseek is known to randomly switch to Chinese output for no reason at all. As I was using Claude chat as a poor man’s reviewer, I just pasted it over and Claude interpreted it without skipping a beat and responded in English.

Actually, when you translate Chinese literally word for word, it sounds a lot like caveman English.

你不去，我也不去

You no go, I also no go

今天这里人很多

Today here person very many

下雨就不去

Fall rain then no go

chinese is less token efficient than english

> Why not Mandarin Chinese? Logographic is pretty compact […]

What do you mean? A lot of us already use Hanzi (汉字) or Kanji.

Or are you asking why non-Chinese speakers do not prompt LLMs in Mandarin?

Pretty seen we will all be speaking tokenese anyways

It would take the typical English speaker many years of dedicated study to learn Mandarin Chinese to a level of fluency required to take advantage of any token savings. "Caveman speak" can be adopted instantly, by anyone (in, presumably, ~any language) with no study or time investment required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin

problem is there are thousands of pictograms you have to know with ambiguous sounds

i think korean is the best, just learn the alphabet and you can do pretty crazy compaction by dropping honorifics and abbreviation, you can also sound out foreign words ex. 짱깨 if given the right context LLMs should have no problem understanding