Fwiw, it's been very easy to nudge Qwen 27B/35B to think in Chinese. No need for <think> prefills like "思考：" ("Think:") or such.
Relatedly, when chatting with frontier models about science education content design, I've found it very helpful to mix in Chinese education terms. In English, for example, NGSS is such a massive attractor, discussing nearby topics often yields NGSS "slop". And "estimation" (educational) in the US means one (dysfunctional:) thing, which similarly distracts. Perhaps if AIs become increasingly multilingual, but remain weak at deep conceptual reasoning, it may be fruitful to have multilingual thesauruses, to use language-associated cultural conceptual differences as a way to convey conceptual nuances with which LLMs otherwise struggle?
Relatedly, when chatting with frontier models about science education content design, I've found it very helpful to mix in Chinese education terms. In English, for example, NGSS is such a massive attractor, discussing nearby topics often yields NGSS "slop". And "estimation" (educational) in the US means one (dysfunctional:) thing, which similarly distracts. Perhaps if AIs become increasingly multilingual, but remain weak at deep conceptual reasoning, it may be fruitful to have multilingual thesauruses, to use language-associated cultural conceptual differences as a way to convey conceptual nuances with which LLMs otherwise struggle?