Dialects, languages, pidgins and creoles are all different things to a linguist.

Rotors would be cool. :)

Planes do work on Duna and Eve. You just can't use airbreathing engines since there's no oxygen in the atmosphere.

Even Martian storm winds are very weak due to the thin atmosphere. Light breeze at most. On a side note, this is one of the two deliberate inaccuracies in The Martian.

But written Cantonese from Hong Kong isn't intelligible to Mandarin speakers.

Linguists debate whether the different Chineses are languages or dialects. In any case Cantonese and Mandarin, just to name two variants, are mutually unintelligible. Not at all like Standard German and Swiss German, or even Spanish and Italian.

You're assuming there is a need for the average Chinese person to communicate with someone who doesn't speak Mandarin. Greater China has well north of a billion inhabitants. It's not like a small country, say Slovakia, where interactions in other languages happen all the time.

Well, we'd have to open up the can of worms of whether the Chineses are languages or dialects. ;)

Thanks for sharing your experience. Interesting. Certainly here in HK you need English for most office jobs, but I didn't realize this was so widespread in the Mainland.

Good question. The strongly monolingual countries I can think of are China (PRC), Japan and most English speaking countries. On the other hand if you look at, say India or The Philippines there are so many regional languages and dialects that many, if not most, speak at least two languages.

At a guess, most Chinese are monolingual. Living in Greater China you typically have no need for more than Mandarin and written Chinese.

I don't think you're "fucked in the modern world" if you don't speak English. It depends on where you live. For example if you speak Chinese and live in Greater China, you don't need English. Pretty much everything is in Chinese, including the software you use.

For what it's worth, that makes sense to me. He's always sounded somewhat Norwegian to my ears.

Sounds good indeed. However I'd wager most small aircraft crashes are due to the pilot not checking something pre-flight or flying into conditions he/she and the plane are not fit to handle.

That I cannot answer. While I grew up there, I haven't lived in Sweden for more than a decade.

While it is one of the Nordic Countries, you gotta remember Iceland is rather far from Sweden. ;)

As a pilot, I'd classify "running out of fuel" as "pilot error". In a small aircraft, you always, always, always, check the levels in the tanks before a flight and you always leave yourself plenty of margin. Running out of fuel is pretty much inexcusable.

Like most Swedes, I've never understood how foreigners think we sound like the Swedish Chef. It's weird.

The song is "Vintersaga" from 1984, written and originally sung by Ted Ström. The more well known version is a cover by Monica Törnell. The title means "Winter Tale". Very Swedish.

She's not Swedish, nor even Scandinavian. ;)