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Wojciech Dasiukiewicz
Wojciech Dasiukiewicz

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English in the programming world

I am wondering what do you think about a programmer who doesn't know English? I know English is an international language but how to learn it in an efficient way?

I think my English is terrible but I try to improve it. Is there anyone who can help me feel more comfortable with it?

Top comments (5)

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

As a native English speaker, I can tell you right now there are many native speakers whose grasp of the language is awful. I can't tell how many times I've had to decipher emails from clients who are successful business people, but who lack the ability to write a coherent sentence.

As noted in Eric Raymond's How to be a Hacker:

Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to.

Your English already looks better to me than many native speakers, and it's only going to improve with practice. And being multilingual is tremendously useful, whatever the languages are.

If you're writing something and are unsure about how something reads, you can always ask a friendly native speaker to proofread it for you. And there are plenty of tools available to help you write better content - Grammarly is useful for in the browser, and if you write content in Markdown, consider using a tool such as write-good.

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octocodeio profile image
Wojciech Dasiukiewicz

Thank you for your reply :) Writing is not a problem for me now. As you said Grammarly is very helpful. But I need to practice speaking. Maybe I start my youtube channel :D

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ibnsamy96 profile image
Mahmoud Ibn Samy

hi Wojciech, I hope you are having a good day.
I'm just like you, as an Egyptian I know a little English. But someone told me that the most important thing is to understand and to be understood.
Actually, I believe that this mindset helped me a lot to deal with speaking English.
Also, apps like Google translate or Grammarly are helpful methods to improve your communication.
Hope you the best.

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octocodeio profile image
Wojciech Dasiukiewicz

Yep, when I was at school we had two guests from Brazil. They were traveling around the world to exchange knowledge about countries. But the most important thing that they say to me was "Everyone has a problem with English. Nobody cares how you speak if they can understand you". But for me now speaking in English is very stressful because I don't use it every day (in speaking). So this is why my Instagram is now in English. I create content for programmers globally because I use English :) Now I'm translating my website and blog posts. The best in that is you can really create something for people from all around the World. Very motivating.

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liama482 profile image
Liam A.

As a native English speaker I agree with everything that has been said. If I can understand someone then I'm not going to get mad. If I don't understand someone, I won't get mad but I might get a bit frustrated. It is interesting that English is so predominant on the internet.

But yes, you also seem to have great English. Side note: do people usually spell you city "Cracow" or "Krakow"? Because I've seen both.