It’s been a while since I wrote a pure opinion post. If this is your first encounter with me, let’s just say I am a relatively opinionated person. ...
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I love that someone wrote this all down. I thought I was weird for having internal monologues with me. My process used to be: think in Romanian, translate to English, speak out English. But since I moved out of Romania, I've gradually started to lose that, to the point now I default to English. I really struggle when I go back to Romania, it takes a few seconds to find my words.
Now I wanna go back to Romania when u're there just to hang out >_<
Hey! Awesome article on bilingual-isms! I grew up speaking Mandarin (parents from Taiwan) and later learned English in school. I grew up in the US and Canada so now, my English is better than my Mandarin, but I still can’t really read/write Traditional Chinese script 😂 as It e never got down to learning it even now, and my parents never pushed me to. Still, my quirk these days is counting in Mandarin (anyone experience this?!) but speaking more fluently in English. Also, losing a word in one language and making up for it in a thick accent with my other language (this was a meme; don’t quote me) 😂
My friend counts in French! Maybe mathematical concepts are a different beast :p
LOL honestly 😄
I love this article! Also, I'm trilingual :D (I speak Marathi, Hindi, and English)
My mother tongue is Marathi (It is one of the Indian languages spoken by the people of Maharashtra) so I speak to my parents and native friends in Marathi. Also, I studied in a Marathi medium school and till 5th class, we had all our subjects in Marathi. It was an advantage. It is easier to understand concepts in your mother tongue. After 5th, we had something called a semi-english. so we had Maths, Science in English and Geography, History in Marathi till 10th and after 10th everything has been in English only.
Hindi is a commonly used language in India. So it is generally used when you communicate with someone who has a different mother tongue. You never really have to learn it, you just start understanding it because of the people around you.
Funnily, I learned most of my English because of multiplayer games.
It hasn't really been an issue since I get to use all three languages every day. (Marathi with parents, Hindi with some friends and at local places, English in Tech Meetups, College, and some friends)
The only problem is I know maths tables in Marathi and I don't know 90% of the vegetable names in English 😂
wow, thank you for sharing ♥️
omg I feel u so hard about the vegetable names!!
I love this post! A book that gave me a lot of insight into how language shapes the way we think is Through the Language Glass. It became even the source for a talk on the subject I've given now twice at RubyConf and at Birmingham on Rails! :)
Ooooo, that's going on my reading list, thanks for the recommendation! :D
My "mother tongue" is English.. though I used to speak another language when I was small as well.
My school tongue was Spanish.
I did college in the US, in English.
I taught CS college in Spanish. It takes some adjusting to find the right technical terms that are often mistranslated.
I work both in English and Spanish interchangeably at a daily basis. I think in both languages interchangeably with ease. Though I more readily curse in English.
Most of the world is at least bilingual. We often treat it as something odd, but its actually the norm. But it used to be that people were made to feel ashamed for knowing another language (maybe still so) in some places. Monolingualism is rare. Most my African friends will say when asked that they know only 2-3 languages, but then if you ask more carefully they'll say they know another 2-3 "dialects" as well (which often are full local languages from different families). I'd say monolingualism is mostly in the US and maybe a few other places (even in the US its getting rarer).
But often it matters what your professional language is. I learned math in Spanish, so I didn't know how to pronounce "logarithm" when I went to college.
Similarly in Spanish I didn't know how to say "library" (as in "Java libraries") since in Spanish the convention is to mistranslate it to "librería" (when it should be "biblioteca" if you want to translate correctly). There were similar difficulties with words like "hash table" ("tabla de dispersión" I found in a book). Or "procedural programming" ("programación procedual" which is impossible to find almost anywhere). I find reading technical material in Spanish frustrating since the translators often mess up.
You touched on something (tangentially related) that I have also been thinking about more now that I'm older, and that is how media shapes our perceptions, at least it did more when I was younger. Because we got a lot of American entertainment on television when I was a kid, it seemed as if the "outside world" = "America" but the truth is most of the world is not America, and so much more diverse and interesting than what we were exposed to simply through media.
I've been speaking English for 10 years and I still count in Spanish!
I totally agree that speaking more than one language changes the way you think about things. It does for programming languages too, right? Even though computing is fundamentally the same, writing Java vs. Lisp will probably influence how you design your algorithms. Similar tools for the same job can definitely influence how the task is done!
Super cool article 👍
you make a really good point that programming languages with their own paradigms also impact how we organise our thoughts around code
Sometimes I feel like my personality changes when I switch from Lithuanian to English. 🤔
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give a presentation in my first language ( Spanish), since when I’m nervous I just start making up words :/
I tend to feel that because a lot of computing was pioneered in English-speaking regions, there are lots of terms and phrases that never have good equivalents