
Ask HN: Do you think primarily in English? - palish
Rather, do you think primarily in your native language, or more in terms of abstract imagery?<p>I've noticed that rather than forming images in my head to represent ideas, I will instead often <i>think in English</i>.  For example, if I'm working through a logic problem, I will repeat the various elements of the problem in my head <i>in English</i> repeatedly until I solve it.<p>I'm unfortunately unilingual.  English is the only human language I have ever learned.  I've noticed that when I speak phrases in Spanish, I'm actually speaking English in my head.  It's like a lookup table. By that I mean, let's say I want to communicate "How are you?".  Rather than attempting to reason through this task in Spanish (by trying to communicate the individual elements "how", 'in what way', "are", 'your state of being', and "you" 'the person I am communicating with'), I try to remember the phrase in Spanish that corresponds to the ordered set of words "How are you?".  So it is rote memorization -- I'm not thinking in Spanish, I'm translating from English to Spanish, speaking it, then hearing a response and translating that back into English.  No wonder I was never able to learn another language.  There's always this complicated layer of indirection.<p>Anyway, back to the topic: do you find that you think more in terms of words or of images?<p>Here's one reason I can't imagine thinking through a problem without reciting it to myself in English several times.  Let's say for example I need to describe the concept 'empathy', which is to say, understanding another person's situation by virtue of having been in a similar one yourself.  I'd imagine it would be very difficult to conjure up an image which succinctly describes empathy.  It seems like the verbal encoding "empathy" is probably the most succinct way to describe it.  So why try to think in terms of images when our native languages are so very precise?<p>And yet, "thinking in English" can be a burden.  I can feel how it limits me to thinking through problems in certain predefined ways, just as a given editor forces you to edit text in certain predefined ways.  I would imagine that most extremely creative people (such as DaVinci, Tesla, etc) probably don't have this limitation imposed on their neocortex.<p>More importantly, my reading speed is significantly degraded.  I tend to recite each sentence to myself as I read it.  I've been unable to find much information about how to break this limitation, so any references would be very appreciated.<p>Thoughts?
======
comatose_kid
I think in 6502 op-codes. That's probably why many people think I'm
'emotionally distant'.

~~~
kwamenum86
People who are fluent in a foreign language actually learn to think in that
language as well. They switch back and forth between modes of thought. This is
why they can rattle off phrases in the language rather than speak it in the
very broken manner that the less fortunate (myself included) would.

------
jd
I'm Dutch and I often find myself thinking in English. If I work in English
all day I context switch and English becomes my "default" language. When I
wake up the next day my first thoughts will then be in English. Until I
consciously switch back I'll continue to function in en_us mode.

It can be really annoying at times. I constantly mix up proverbs and language
constructs when I'm context switching, I often know a word in only one of the
two languages and can't think of a good translation, and so forth. And more
often than not there is no 1-to-1 correspondence between English and Dutch
words, so it's easy to get frustrated knowing exactly what you want to say,
but being unable to say it because the words don't exist in your native
language.

I don't think it matters much whether you think only in English, in several
languages, or in pictures/emotions. A game I sometimes played as a kid was to
take a concept and repeatedly think of more succinct definitions for it with a
friend. And the cool thing is that despite getting the original definition
wrong, in the end you always end up with a definition both parties agree on.
People rarely think about the exact definition of any every-day word, and yet
people are capable of intuitively picking the "right" definition from a list.

To completely derail this thread I'll challenge you to define the word
"chair". It's not "something you sit on", because you can side on a couch and
a couch is not a chair. Nor is it "something you sit on with legs", because
then it could be either a stool or a bench.

The point is, when you think of the word "chair", you're not thinking in
English. You're thinking about the concept chair, and that's one you can't
define without some effort. And defining it in words is completely unnecessary
because you __know __what a chair is. It's no different for the word
"empathy".

ps: Your definition empathy doesn't pass the sociopath test. A sociopath
notices somebody else is hurting, and knows what pain feels like, which is for
your definition sufficient. But textbook sociopaths lack empathy. So empathy
must be more than mere recognition of an emotion. Yes, this is nitpicking, but
that's kind of the point.

~~~
jeroen
I'm Dutch as well and with work (software dev) and most of the stuff I read
(HN, books) mostly in English, the language of my thoughts tends to follow the
language of my current activity.

Whenever I'm speaking Dutch and an English word better conveys what I'm trying
to say, I just use the English word. Most people barely notice. For extra fun
use German and French words too!

------
markessien
Nobody thinks in English or any language. I know this, because I actually
thought about the problem you are describing when I was a child of about 8 - I
was faced with the problem because some guy said he thinks in words. I
realised that I didn't think in words, but in concepts.

Later, when I was much older, I realised that parts of my thinking seemed to
be words - but just seemed. With some effort, it's possible to remove the
words from the thinking and just think in concepts - the words are
automatically placed on your thoughts, but you are not thinking in them.

Let me explain again : You have a thought, and then the words matching that
thought are created. Then you reprocess those words as input. You can also
skip the reprocessing step, but for that you have to avoid a fatal mistake -
the replacement for words is not images. Rather, you need to simply not try to
inteprete the concepts you are working with in your head.

For example, if I say 'empathy', you know what it means without a dictionary
definition of empathy. If I write out a sentence - the man felt empathy with
his begging son, you can imagine the situation without needing words or
pictures, and only when the entire concept is finished do you convert it into
words. I.e, in the sentence above, you are not breaking empathy down, you are
breaking the entire sentence down.

There is a simple way to discover how to do this - think of some random
object. Then think of something related to that object, then something else
related to it. For example Book, Page, Letters, Reader. And so on. Just go
through a list of interconnected things, but as you do so, try actively to
avoid putting words on the concepts. After a while, also try not putting
pictures either. You should see your thinking speed up significantly as you
improve.

~~~
wheels
_Nobody thinks in English or any language._

That's a pretty bold statement that many eminent linguists and psychologists
would disagree with.

From my limited knowledge of linguistics what I've gathered is that current
thoughts are that people think in symbols, which are often words, and that our
abilities to think in many types of abstract thought are directly connected to
the language faculty of the brain. Modern linguistics is driving towards there
being a fundamental underlying universal grammar in which human languages can
be seen as specializations of.

The unification of cognitive psychology and linguistics seems to be one of the
goals at the moment, and there is the notion that abstract thought and
language aren't fundamentally different things.

~~~
markessien
Alright, what about a child who sees cars everyday, but has never been told
what a car is. He can still manipulate the car concept as easily as if he knew
the word for it.

Or some people have very small vocabularies, simply because they have been
exposed to a small number of words - does that affect their cognitive skills?

Abstract though and language may not be fundamental different things, I don't
have enough information to say. But what I am saying in my post is that first
you think in a concept, then you translate it into a word. You don't think in
the word first. So you can think without needing to translate it into words.
The relationship between the words and the concepts is of course strong,
because we use words to vocalize the concepts we have.

Think about it - what is a word actually? It's just a series of sounds we
create in the air. So the sound of a word is quite irrelevant to the concept
behind it - the construction of the word is not relevant. Imagine we did not
have mouths but instead we communicated by flashing a series of pictures in
the air. The part of us that creates these pictures is just a sensory IO
appliance like our eyes or mouth. Would that change us in any fundamental way?
No - we would construct a similar grammar and communication method with
pictures as we would with words.

What this implies is that the words themselves are unimportant, they are just
representations of concepts we are dealing with. This representation can take
many forms - but because we are used to vocalising our thoughts, when we do
indeed think, we automatically prepare the things we are dealing with for
vocalisation, leading to the illusion that words are actually involved.

What happens this is that this vocalisation becomes a sort of feedback loop
for your thoughts - you think of concepts, convert them into words, then
reabsorb the words to be reprocessed as if someone told you them. That is,
they come back in as if you were listening to them from other people. You can
observe this sometimes with people when they mutter to themselves. When we
rehear our own thoughts, we can sometimes process them better (for reasons I
don't know). But this step is optional, one can also do it without
reprocessing, though this will fail with very abstract things that actually
need concepts alien to us.

~~~
wheels
You might find this interesting:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_language#Pirah.C3.A3_and...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_language#Pirah.C3.A3_and_the_Sapir.E2.80.93Whorf_hypothesis)

A lot of what you're saying is intuitive, but modern research suggests that
it's wrong.

~~~
markessien
That could be, but if everybody always stuck with what the current scientific
dogma is, we would still think the earth were flat.

~~~
brent
Likewise, if people ignored scientific evidence in favor of their intuition we
would still think the earth was flat.

It turns out we're all better off if we _first_ understand the "current
scientific dogma" and then challenge it with scientific evidence.

------
ChaitanyaSai
Native and non-native (even if fluent) speakers recruit different areas of the
brain when speaking or comprehending a language. This is now well known from
fMRI studies.
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T0G-3W1YGT5-9&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4c5ba2d912c6bb17c3920b75ca3a1f51)
: From the abstract (Listening to comprehensive but non-native language seems
to demand more networked co-processing.) Another one:
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WNP-4J2W0GN-4&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=25e0ec3fba6f6d6ce97793cd4ec8353f)

Non-native speakers recruit more brain regions, suggesting that more
"concepts/whatever" are being invoked in the formulation or parsing of a
sentence. With this in mind, it would seem that even people who assume they
are thinking in a certain language, are only accessing a post-conceptual
process (language formulation). Conceptual relations between objects or other
concepts may still have been put in place in a ways influenced by the language
in which you picked them up.

For the same reasons as above, verbal encoding of empathy is probably not the
succinct representation the brain uses; you just happen to have conscious
access to the verbal encoding only. I would guess though, that something like
the Implicit Association Test would uncover more.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_Association_Test>

As for your Spanish, you will stop using the English-to-Spanish pre-processing
crutch once you get more fluent (with practice and repetition).

------
iamelgringo
I was raised in Central America by US parents. At 4, I knew more Spanish than
English. We moved back to the US when I was 14. Since then, I've lost quite a
bit of my Spanish, but I'm still fluent.

When I was younger, I would think in Spanish and occasionally dream in
Spanish. I don't do that any more. I've been in the US for so long that the
transition to thinking in Spanish requires effort.

But, yes, there are concepts and shades of meaning in one language that are
hard to communicate in the other.

I think that being monocultural is much more constraining than being
monolingual, however. When you grow up between separate cultures, you're not
only acutely aware of multiple ways of talking. You're also acutely aware that
there are multiple ways of living, of relating to people and family, much
different sets of priorities, completely different ways of problem solving and
of being. It's hard to appreciate unless you've made a big cultural transition
like emigrating or growing up multicultural.

If you want to get past it, move to another country for a couple of years.

~~~
huherto
Your Spanish may be a bit rusty. But I think you will be able to become fluent
very fast if you had a chance to practice more. edit:grammar

------
dkokelley
I too think is English. It's the only language I'm fluent in so that much is
natural. One interesting thing I've noticed is that when I'm conceptualizing
something, I will have an idea in my head, but out of some bizarre habit I
will think the words through.

My point is that I already know what I'm going to say in my mind, but there is
no reason to actually hear my brain think them. Basically I go through 3 steps
in my thought process:

1\. Think or conceptualize,

2\. recite what I've thought to myself (in my mind, in English of course),

3\. process what I've just heard myself think and act on it.

My question is this: why is step 2 necessary? It would be faster just going
from conceptualization to processing, wouldn't it? Maybe it's a habit from
reading at a young age when I sound the words out in my mind as I read.

~~~
raamdev
Or perhaps putting it in words makes you feel confident enough about the
conceptualization to proceed with action. I often find myself doing far too
much "planning" and "checking for possible errors/pitfalls" before taking
action on something I have conceptualized (probably in part due to the
perfectionist in me).

------
randomwalker
In case you are unaware, the question of how much of our thinking is language-
constrained has been extensively studied in linguistics and cognitive science.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis> is a good starting
point. Anecdotal evidence is great, but you should also look into the studies.

My personal perspective: I am natively trilingual, as an Indian person.
(someone else mentioned this as well.) My two Indian languages have fallen to
near-complete disuse, to the point that I'm only borderline fluent in them.
Nevertheless, growing up with two or more languages forces a child to seek
common denominators, and thus think in terms of imagery.

This is definitely the case for me. As soon as I focused on the word "empathy"
for a few seconds, I actually had two different images come to mind. These
were both _exemplars_ , as in, specific instances of people in my life showing
empathy, one from recent memory and one from long ago. That's the trick with
imagery -- it can often be crude, and only cover a special case of the
concept, but it still does the job much better than words. You mention
precision. Precision can in fact be a disadvantage, given the inherent
ambiguity of human thought.

This is learnable. It gets harder as you age, but never impossible. To improve
thought imagery, try this. Buy a ginormous whiteboard and cover one wall of
your room/office with it. _Draw everything_. You might initially have to
struggle with coming up with any sort of image. Your perfectionism, and your
poor perception of your drawing skills, if you suffer from those, might hinder
you. Try and lose your inhibitions. When you're at your computer, keep looking
at the whiteboard once in a while. You want to get to the point where if
there's a concept you're working on over a few days, every time you think of
that concept, you should immediately be able to see the corresponding picture
in your mind's eye. Also keep reams of paper around. Again, draw everything.
I'll even start drawing on napkins if a thought comes into my head that I need
to draw and I can't find paper. Hopefully, you will eventually be able to
'draw' effortlessly in your head.

Here's a solution for your "lookup table" problem. This is a technique that is
used in teaching accents, but I have also used it in learning new languages.
_Pick a character._ It could be a friend, or a character from a TV show, just
anyone who speaks Spanish (preferably exclusively). When you're trying to
speak Spanish, _be that person_. Imagine you're them, to the extent possible.
It will make it a lot easier to push the English out of your head.

Finally, subvocalization (i.e, reciting sentences to yourself). Also
(un)-learnable. Start gliding your eyes over the text rapidly. At first, you
won't understand anything. Try the same sentence again. Force yourself not to
say the words. If it's too hard, go fast enough that you can't possibly say
the words. Keep doing that until you derive at least some meaning from the
sentence. Start from there, and hopefully you'll get better slowly.

These are all things I've used to various degrees. Thinking in English is not
a big problem for me, but more imagery helps, no matter what. YMMV, but hope
this all helps!

~~~
litewulf
Not a linguist, but I took some classes ;)

I think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a pretty imperfect fit for the question.
Even the weaker form doesn't really gel well. The question seems more do
certain modes of thought make you tend to think of certain languages, and not
so much "do certain languages impact behavior".

Basically, its generally formulated in the opposite manner, and like many
things, cause and effect can not usually be reversed and still have the
reasoning hold ;)

Also, I grew up effectively trilingual as well. I simply associate the
different languages with different areas of thought. Math/science is English,
food/home-y things is Chinese (and er, well, Taiwanese+Japanese also
food/home), and I really don't think in terms of imagery. So I think you're
definitely in anecdote territory. (BTW: I actually count in Chinese, because
its a tad more uniform and the words are shorter, but operators I use
English.)

I wonder if language learning methods will vary from person to person, because
most of your advice totally disagrees with my experiences learning Spanish
later in life. I learnt through rote memorization, but followed up with a
conversation partner, so, to continue the lookup table analogy, I simply used
the lookup table until it became so commonly used that it stayed in cache and
not memory. Then over time, segments were pulled out and their structure
transformed (length of cache value increased, keys switched to a general
emotion), until more and more of it was "fluid".

(The other possibility, which I'm very inclined to believe, is that describing
your own learning process is a crap shoot. You find analogies you're pleased
with, and selection bias takes over.)

~~~
whacked_new
I take a medium-strong form of S-W. It makes sense in the connectionist model
(which I also take a medium-strong interpretation).

The strongest form says that concepts in one language are completely alien to
another, such that if you don't know the concepts in one language, you cannot
perceive them. This is obviously false.

However, as related concepts are evoked by spread-activation, it is completely
plausible that one language allows more efficient retrieval of certain
concepts, such that very strong biases result.

The famous example of the many Inuit words for snow comes to mind. It is true
that a non-Inuit speaker is able to discern between different kinds of snow,
but the language guides the mind in terms of where to look for details.
Without this guide, it is easy to get lost and confused.

Here's the familiar example for hackers: code in C/Basic/Pascal for a while,
and switch to Python/Ruby (or vice versa). After you get used to the target
language, and look back at the code right after the switch, you'll notice that
a lot of programming constructs are out-of-place and "counterintuitive." This
is, so to speak, Sapir-Whorf "at work."

This is also why when LISPers say that you should learn lisp, because it will
make you a better programmer, they are correct. :)

~~~
pfedor
The comparison with programming languages is extremely misleading, because,
unlike natural languages, programming languages do differ in the expressive
power. An algorithm coded in Haskell or Lisp may well be 5x less code than an
equivalent thing in C or Java. On the other hand, when a text is translated
from one natural language to another the result is typically of the same
length and typically there's even an almost one-to-one mapping between
individual sentences.

To anyone interested in the relations between the language and thinking, I
recommend an excellent book "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker. One
chapter is devoted to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, more specifically, to
debunking it.

~~~
whacked_new
Two things: again, I don't espouse the strongest form of Sapir Whorf. The
interpretation of differences in speed of access to concepts, based on spread-
activation, however, is solid. When I learned Sapir Whorf we were given the
original interpretation and a brief of how it has been reinterpreted more
recently -- but it still goes by the name of Sapir Whorf. I am not making a
case for the possibility of expression. I am make a case for the _salience_ of
expressions in different languages. It should be easy to show this: take two
languages and find two words of identical meaning, and measure the response
speed to comprehension of these words. All other things equal, the higher-
frequency word will be accessed faster. Hence, if one culture says Apple more
than Orange, Apple is more salient in the former culture. You will then expect
more efficient access to Apple-related concepts.

Second, what makes you think that natural languages do not differ in
expressive power? Certain things are more easily said in one language than
another, just as some constructs may be easier to represent in one language or
another, although they may be able to create the same results.

I also don't know where you get the "typically the same length" from. Stephen
Pinker wrote about the relative length of English in one of his books. I don't
remember which he was comparing to, but English is longer. Pinker explained
this along the lines of English being more "fault tolerant" due to more
"redundancy" (my words).

------
warwick
Sure, ask this while I'm sitting here with a Linguistics text studying for a
final. This post is going to be a bit long.

Empathy is a hard word to bring up an image of because it's meaning is largely
connotative rather than denotative. On the other hand, there are many words
('Book', 'Clarinet', 'Web Browser', and all the other things I can see from
where I'm sitting) for which it's simple to form an image. The words are
largely symbols which denote an entity.

Now to drift from the topic:

I think in either my native language (English), or in images. Flashes of
insight tend to come as images. Generally the hardest problems I work on are
design situations rather than algorithmic, so I think images are the best way
for fully formed answers to pop into my brain.

I'm also unilingual. Canadian English is the only natural language where I
regard myself as being fluent. I speak some French (Quebecois), but by and
large it's parroting full phrases when I speak. My reading comprehension is
sufficient that I can interpret arbitrary French when the vocabulary is in my
limited lexicon, however my grammar is quite weak when it comes to forming new
phrases. My formal education in French was poor, as I was taught essentially
arbitrary vocabulary by non-fluent teachers. All through high school I read
French in much the same way as you speak Spanish, by treating another language
as something that I was just lacking the mental dictionary for.

I lived in southern Quebec for a couple of years while attending University.
Though it was an English town and school, a fantastic amount of the signage
was in French.

Some time ago a friend and I were driving through Montreal. More accurately he
was driving and freaking out about the traffic, I was navigating and
translating the road signs for him. Having been exposed to French road signs
for a couple years I'm competent in that area. I realized that I wasn't
translating into English in my head when I started getting frustrated at how
_slow_ it was to translate the signs to him. I would read them, have to find
the equivalent concept in English, and then say it. In the end I just started
directing him where to turn instead of reading him individual signs. The layer
of indirection doesn't last forever. One day I'd like to be able to speak the
language like I can read the road signs.

------
weiser
My view is that people think in (1) words (2) pictures and (3) concepts. How
much of each depends upon the individual.

As for myself, I think mostly in pictures and concepts, very rarely in words.

I am bilingual, but since I rarely use words for thinking, languages don't
matter as much.

~~~
tempest67
I completely agree with this -- I am bilingual too, but the words seem to
spring out of the flow of thought, not to "be" the flow. And when I'm learning
a new language (or enough rudiments not to be impolite when visiting, say,
Lisbon) I never have this "translation table" issue the OP mentions -- at
least, I don't think I do. There is no transitional linguistic step between
the thought-flow and the words, new or not. (Of course, that doesn't mean that
language pickup is necessarily easier -- just different.)

------
kennon
I'm actually learning Russian right now, while living in St. Petersburg, so I
think about this a lot. The program I'm in is intended to take us to a high
level of fluency-- Superior, or Level 3-4 on the various scales. As a result,
there is a lot of talk about thinking in the target language. I, sadly, still
feel like I very rarely do this. I can handle very simple contexts rapidly,
but I don't know if I'm actually thinking directly in Russian, or simply using
the lookup table you describe at an extremely rapid rate. When I read texts or
hear other people speaking in Russian, I almost always still reform the
sentences into English in my head.

Some of the other students seem to not have this problem. By their own
admission, they're able to operate in many, if not most, contexts completely
in Russian-- though, of course, there's no way to know what this means. They
mention dreaming in Russian, for instance. This hasn't happened to me yet.
There are times when I can intuit what someone wants without actually
translating word for word, but usually that's just because I didn't catch all
of their words to begin with.

It might be background-- I'm the only engineer, the others are all Russian
majors. Maybe they have less need of precise rules and translations. It's very
hard for me to adopt a new Russian phrase without having found an English
equivalent for it. It might be time spent learning the language. The other
students have been at it 2, 3 times longer than I have. It might just be that
I'm older: 30, as opposed to 22, 23. When I was in the Peace Corps, the
volunteers in their 50s and 60s had huge problems learning the local language.
So it's probably true that, at least for most people, the older you get, the
more ingrained your modes of thought. I guess that means that the earlier you
can expand this, the better.

------
dimitar
I think in the language that I am using or have experience on the subject - my
native language is Bulgarian, but sometimes I think in an another language
when I face a concept I experienced in another language. Those cannot be only
natural languages but also formal ones - its too confusing and slow to
translate mathematical, psychics, programming or any notation into a natural
language.

I sometimes only know English terminology on a subject and I am forced to
think and even use English words.. I consciously try to avoid that. Usually
people with only ostensible knowledge of English AND the subject pollute their
native language with unnecessary foreign words. Unfortunately those people are
very common here and annoy me daily, but on the other hand its fairly easy to
separate the signal from the noise by looking at how often such fancy words
are used.

I really recommend this essay in which the unnecessary use of foreign words is
only part of a bigger problem: George Orwell, "Politics and the English
Language," 1946

------
saundby
English is my primary language, but I also picked up a fair bit of German and
Danish as a child from my grandparents.

I mostly think in English when programming, but when I get into either
specific relationships between elements of the program or high level
conceptualization I tend to slip into German. Names for objects often come out
in Danish if I don't stop and translate them into English.

In college I had some unfortunate partners on a programming project who were
subjected to code written late at night and very quickly with comments in both
English and German and with many Danish identifiers. Fortunately they were up
to the task, and as they were Italian and Norwegian with English as a second
language, they gave as good as they got with the multi-lingual coding.

Our professor requested a full English translation to accompany our source
when we turned it in.

------
tel
In my experience I think in English 90% of the time. When working problems
requiring a lot of spatial insight, I pretty easily switch to something more
visual and visceral. This also happens when I'm drawing and sometimes when I'm
playing music.

I'm also learning Chinese. It is anything but an easy language to learn, I'll
say, and I don't feel like I'll be thinking fluently in it anytime soon. That
being said, if I concentrate and force myself to think in Chinese I can get by
with a huge hit to rate of thought. It's something I practice from time to
time despite the frustration.

------
rokhayakebe
It depends. English is my third lamguage. French is the second. Wolof the
first. I think in all three depending on the situation. When I first moved to
the States I would speak in French in my head and translate it in English from
brain to mouth. As the years went by, I started to automatically think in
English. When I speak with my mom I think and process all the info in Wolof.
If the conversation becomes more political or academic with her, then I start
to process the information in French because that is the administrative
language where I come from.

------
plinkplonk
context: Most educated Indians are trilingual (the provincial language - there
are more than 20 of these, with a few hundred distinct dialects- , Hindi (the
national language), and English. I can read and write French and German but I
don't really think in these.

I find that the "voice in my head" speaks different languages at different
points in time. While programming I use mostly English. I find that sometimes
when stuck on some programming problem, trying to explain/talk about it in
another language often "unsticks" it. No idea why, really.

~~~
litewulf
I associate certain activities with certain languages. Food -> Chinese.
Programming -> English.

At least for me, the language that people usually speak to me in when I do
that task or learn that task is usually what sets the language I think in. I
have somewhat similar experiences with music (certain music makes me want to
code), and even handedness (I yo-yo left-handed because thats how I learnt it)

~~~
wheels
An amusing side effect of that is that though my native language is English,
after 7 years of living in Germany, if I've been drinking I have trouble
forcing myself to switch into English. I catch myself even speaking German to
friends who speak English better than German. Since I'm so used to "social
activities are in German" I can't shake it.

~~~
tempest67
That's interesting -- I never thought of it in terms of context, but I had
similar issues when I returned to the states after 7 years in Germany -- I
would go into shops and order things in German, because my "talk to shop
people in German" bit didn't turn off right away. Some confused/amusing looks
when you say "Ich moechte gern ein Hamburger, bitte" in a restaurant; and it
takes a few months to switch back.

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apu
I find that I use English for everything except 2 major classes of thoughts:

1\. Art. Specifically, if I'm trying to compare some work of art
(music/movie/art), I have a virtual "media player/audiovisual search engine"
in my mind that quickly lets me locate other works that are similar, related,
or otherwise relevant. This similarity is often on the basis of the emotional
content of the work, but I find that I don't need to put the concept into
words to locate it. To use your example, if I'm looking at something that
provokes empathy, I'll think of other works that provoke the same emotion, but
without ever thinking of the word 'empathy' (or any synonyms/etc.).

2\. Science. If I'm trying to understand some scientific concept or if I'm
working on something new (I'm a researcher), I find that I make almost no
progress unless I can form a mental picture of the problem. Only after
creating this picture can I do anything. Then most frequently I'll imagine
myself "flying" through this mental model, tweaking it as I take into account
various other factors, sometimes destroying parts and rebuilding, etc.
Usually, I will come back to this same model over and over until finally I
understand the concept or come up with some new realization.

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inerte
I speak english fairly well, I think... and have an IELTS certificate, so in
theory I could even teach it. This is strange to say here, since most of you
either speaks english as your primary language or also had several years of
exposure to it.

Anyway, I can think in English. I told this to a co-worker and he mocked me,
"hahaha you're so full of yourself", but he asked a friend, an english
teacher, and she told him that she also does it.

My guess is that this s something that comes with usage. I read a _lot_ of
stuff written in english. Heck, sometimes I know the english term but not the
portuguese one, something specially true for things related to my profession.
Sometimes I am not sure how to spell an word in english, or even if it exists,
and I google for it, and the first result is from a dictionary... meaning the
word isn't even used that much.

Here's an anecdote: I have a friend who is a musician and works mixing movies.
Once I told him that I can't think, or make sounds in my head, using multiple
tracks. By that I mean, when I think about a drum sound, and try to imagine a
guitar riff with it, the drum always "stop". The notes don't intercalate. And
well... he told me that he can, which is way cool.

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gur2
Just practice more Spanish.

I am a Spanish native speaker who later learned English, French and Italian
for work. In my case, I don't have the feeling of translating
sentences/ideas/concepts to English in my mind. They just come naturally, or
don't come at all. When they don't come naturally, it's normally because of a
lack of vocabulary, so I switch to Spanish and lookup that word/expression in
a dictionary.

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paraschopra
Whenever there is a hard problem, I try to visualize it and form a mental
movie out of it. For example, if it is some sort of algorithm or optimization
problem, I like to ride through the function/algorithm landscape.
Visualization really helps in clearing thought.

But in everyday thought process, I do think in Hindi or English.

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lacker
I don't think people are capable of introspecting with enough accuracy to tell
if they think in English. When you try to describe how you think, you might
say you think in English, but perhaps you just don't have words accurate
enough to explain how thought really works.

~~~
h34t
Do you speak more than one language? The people I know who do, are usually
very clear that they find themselves thinking in one or another language.

~~~
huherto
Yes, and at least for me it takes some effort to switch from one to the other.
But to be fare with the previous post I do not know if it is the same process
when you are speaking and when you are thinking about a problem.

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aristus
When thinking about numbers and music, it's primarily colors and shapes. Every
tone and digit has a different color-shape. "Blue notes" really are blue,
flats are brown, harmony is a slurry-grey pattern that's hard to describe. :)

I think primarily in English or Spanish words, then pictures when I am ramping
up into a problem. I'll start talking then stop, and my hands reach for a pad
& pen of their own accord.

Once I'm "in", my thinking is not really words and not really pictures.
It's... I don't know. There is a saying: when you want to find a lost horse,
you have to think like the horse. Ideally I identify with whatever it is and I
"think like the horse". Afterwards I discover/rationalize explanations for it.

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vaksel
Thats not being unilingual, that's just not being fluent. The whole definition
of fluent, is that you can speak both languages w/o translating it in your
head.

As far as the whole needing to describe empathy, thats just a lack of
vocabulary...you don't know the word for empathy, so you try to describe it
with other words.

As far as thinking in one language, that's not that uncommon, I'm fluent in 3
languages, and know 2 so-so, but the voice in my head is set to the language I
use most in my day to day life. Sure I can switch to another language on a
whim, but it takes an extra effort.

~~~
silencio
I'm fluent in two languages and know a minimal conversational-level with three
more (and enough that I "think" in those languages, as opposed to a "lookup
table" of sorts). What happens is I usually think in English (most used, maybe
first (still disputed by parents, heh), most knowledgeable in), but once in a
while I'll think in whatever language has a word I know that seems to match
whatever it is best. There's also those loan words in every language that for
whatever reason might seem to fit. I unfortunately can't think of great
examples right now, but one would be schadenfreude (although I don't know
German at all, quite possibly my favorite word ever, although rarely actually
used). It isn't necessarily because I don't know the appropriate vocabulary in
the language, just that whatever word seemed to have the right definitions and
connotations for me to want to use it. Perhaps those word-equivalents in a
different language were extraordinarily obscure, and I don't know of it.

In addition to the above, which is typically my "average" thinking, if I'm
talking to someone in a different language, I don't really "think" in English
until I reach the point I made above, if I come across an English word that
made more sense. I don't know if it takes _extra_ effort, but the language
used to think does seem to change.

Once in a while I'll think of images instead of words. One example are those..
_cough_..shock sites out there.

------
breily
I'd noticed this sometimes too, but I think it's something that you can change
if you want to. When I was learning german, after a couple years of high
school classes I went to a month long full immersion program. When I finished
that, I was thinking entirely in german. This stopped over time as I went back
to English, but I can still make myself do it sometimes. So with
practice/time, you could probably teach yourself to think in something besides
English. Though English seems like it might be the most efficient mode for a
native speaker.

------
kapitti
010011100110111101110000011001010010110000100000
010010010010000001110100011010000110100101101110
011010110010000001101001011011100010000001100010
0110100101101110011000010111001001111001

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swamperfox
If you have time check out Korzybski's general semantics. NLP also deals with
this. One of the classics is Benjamin Worf's 'Language, thought and reality.
Generally speaking, it seems we describe the world to ourselves with internal
dialogue and then react to the words of our description rather than responding
directly to reality.

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davidw
I think in Italian occasionally, but of course English is my native language
so that's what gets used most. When programming, it's English only, and
speaking Italian doesn't come as naturally. I started trying to think in
Italian as a way to practice the language, a long time ago, and found that it
was pretty effective.

------
rjett
Does anyone know if there is anything open-source that is comparative to
Rosetta Stone? I would like to learn Spanish and also brush up on my Italian a
bit. I mention Rosetta Stone because I hear that it's the best language
learning tool out there but I'm open to other learning systems as well.

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noahlt
While it is possible to "think in pictures", language is required to form
complex thoughts.

A long time ago, people who were born deaf were called dumb. This is because,
being deaf, they were never able to learn a language, and therefore could not
form complex thoughts.

------
Restructure
I'm a visual learner, and I think in terms of images, even when programming. I
am also decent at drawing/painting.

The concept of "empathy" makes me think of mirror neurons and makes me imagine
nervous systems of human bodies.

------
strlen
I am bi-lingual: English and Russian (having lived in US since 1996). Often
times, however, I can't quite tell whether it is Russian or English I am
thinking in.

------
markbao
Born in China, with my native language being Mandarin. Moved to USA at 4 years
old. I think in English, though–I rarely use Mandarin day-to-day.

~~~
cglee
I'm similar, except I moved to US at 6. When I'm around English speakers, I
think in English. When I'm around Mandarin speakers, I think in Mandarin. The
funny thing is when I'm around a localized Chinese dialect, say Taiwanese
speakers, the voice in my head adopts that accent too. It's probably because I
don't usually think in Chinese.

------
danw
I think in which ever language I have been using the most recently. This
varies between English, Welsh, French, Japanese, etc.

------
known
I speak 7 languages. Whenever I am in company with this specific linguistic
group I start thinking in their culture.

------
known
Language = Culture (for e.g Japanese)

------
thomasmallen
Native english speaker, but I've known Spanish long enough that sometimes I
think in Spanish.

------
Eliezer
Hazoo fzeem! Wallenmacher bibble zark zark wachoon gra faZAMble!

~~~
MaysonL
Mek holgen Schwatris! Zoonkar bes limforg.

------
mattmaroon
Einstein famously thought in pictures, but very few humans do.

~~~
tempest67
Temple Grandin also famously speaks of thinking in pictures; could this +
Einstein be related to Simon Baron-Cohen's thesis that autism can be defined
as an "oversystematizing" brain?

~~~
mattmaroon
From what I understand, Einstein taught himself to. Is it the same with
Grandin?

------
tontoa4
English

------
lst
The language/culture influences quite a bit.

I know this quite well, because I grew up with a mother language quite
different from my current language (both are _not_ English), so learning other
languages (preferably really different from your mother tongue) is always a
mind opener.

I made this experience: while slowly growing into my 2nd language/culture, I
extended my horizon, without loosing what I learned so far. So, it's not that
I'm now inside my 2nd language, and lost my 1st experience/capabilities, but:
my horizon is widened, I'm more logic and more flexible in both languages, and
in my whole thinking process.

BTW, I never explicitly _think_ in the words of my human language, words _may_
accompany the thinking process, but thinking is so complex and fast, that you
would not be able to follow directly; it mostly 'happens'...

