HACKER Q&A
📣 developortuga

For non-native English speakers, in which language do you think?


I am a Portuguese speaker working in an English speaking environment. I have came to the conclusion that in order to think better and faster in my daily work life, I would have to re-learn new concepts in the "English part" of my brain, i.e., bring the programming synapses closer to the English language synapses.

But I am finding it quite hard, as all other aspects of my life are "attached" to the Portuguese language. I wonder how people that have English as second (or third, fourth, etc.) think.

This question is usually useful when reading new docs or learning new concepts.

  👤 gus_massa Accepted Answer ✓
Hi from Argentina! I can think in Spanish and English. I'm not sure how I learned that, it took a lot of years. Perhaps writing comments here helped, because the pressure is lower than when I talk, because I can go back and fix the text.

Can you watch movies with the voices in English? It helps to learn to understand. You can watch them first with subtitles in Portuguese, then subtitles in English, and then without subtitles. (I'm not sure if it's helpful for your objective.)

But I can't do elementary math in English. For something like 25+17 have to fall back to Spanish. (Most of the time I even read the numbers in Spanish.) (Perhaps I need to learn the addition and multiplication tables in English???)

(And about prepositions: I make a lot of errors. I'd probably be more accurate if I use a random generator to choice the propositions.)