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Comment by guram11 | Hacker News Reader

> Remarkably, we found that the shape of the electric waves recorded in a non-acoustic area of the brain when linguistic expressions are being read silently preserves the same structure as those of the mechanical sound waves of air that would have been produced if those words had actually been uttered

the Rosetta stone idea to map thought from languages waves (sound and light) is an interesting field of research

I have no idea how but since I was young I learned that I can read faster when I don't "voice" out the sound of thought

I also learned that as a multilingual person the "language" of choice for my thought can be different at times, even though I have no actual fondness of using any specifically

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For me, some words and phrases sound better in one language than the other. So in my internal monologue, I often flip back and forth between Polish and English, sometimes multiple times in a single sentence. It feels like "the path of least resistance".

I also do that sometimes when talking, when I know the other person is proficient in English. Not everyone appreciates this, but some of the best conversations in my life were with a particular person who was like me in this regard; we'd just stream our thoughts to each other in this weird mix of Polish and English, that was hard to follow for anyone else.

I know the same feeling with English and German. It really is a wonderful thing. I think this would be called Code-switching [0].

> In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

Wechseln even dans a fraza: http://www.europanto.be/cabillot1.html

Haha.

Minä gör the same a menudo.

Yo teen det samma often.

I hago the same ofta.

Jag do lo mismo usein.

(FI/SV/EN/ES) :)

Wow, closest I can get to that mix is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VqUiSdd3yM , an english band interpreting a finnish tango.

Swedish will have to be separate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hdUKZLQIuQ

(Are you a finland-swede or sweden finn? If either of those, I'm a fan of both Army of Lovers and Nightwish.)

Haha yes that Zappa gig is a classic!

"Swedish-speaking finn" or "Finland-swede" yes.

Belta loda! You sound like your speaking the Belter slang from the scifi series The Expanse. Set a few hundred yrs into the future, slang used by the working class out mining the asteroid belts.

Taki taki. TIL. Tolowda wanya pochuye fo walowda sowngit ke? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ULICEPpoLQ

She she taki taki beltawala. Mi finyish vedi da lang belta da diye de.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCyGIJl1XUA

Y’all, stop. You’re confusing the hell out of GPT-4.

I hope they won't be training it on HN corpus, because I don't want an algorithm to spit out my own rants back at me...

Mi na du wanya wa robot fo du wating mi enjoy

It really is wonderful! Good to know there's an established term for that, thanks!

Now try to imagine instead of English, it's Russian? Switching from Polish to Russian. Will it be the same?

Polish/ukrainian song lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cxciyZEBkE (switching between stanzas, not phrases, however)

Amateur joint translation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101696

(any native speakers care to say how close we came?)

(and notdang, on the off chance you're from somewhere around Moldova, what would you say the ethnicity of the girl in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406864 might be? I think a woman from Moldova is the normal reading, but apparently there's also an Odessa neighbourhood called Moldavanka...)

I know a little bit of Russian so a random word or two sometimes sneak into my speech or thinking process. I imagine if I were fluent in Russian, I'd switch back and forth just as well. They're more similar to each other than Polish and English, but not that similar as to be bucketed as one language.

I've been thinking about this phenomenon a lot in the past and I've noticed that two main triggers are a) emotional payload of a phrase, and b) subtle differences in meaning of words. Some phrases sound better to me in English than in Polish, and it's probably driven by the context in which I've learned them. As for words, it's often the case that even if a word in Polish corresponds directly to a word in English by dictionary, their etymologies and general use patterns draw slightly different borders in thingspace. Sometimes that distinction is important, and I automatically pick the language in which the word is closer to what I mean.

Not sure what are the sentiments in Poland, but in a couple of ex-USSR countries mixing Russian and the local language is regarded as a very bad taste. This applies exclusively to Russian.

> I have no idea how but since I was young I learned that I can read faster when I don't "voice" out the sound of thought

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

The obvious follow up experiment is to have the subjects read silently first, then read aloud.

(I've also found I can readily manipulate algebraic symbols without having any idea of how they should be pronounced. splodge?)

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/bc/35/67bc35746db0758b5ab4...

>I have no idea how but since I was young I learned that I can read faster when I don't "voice" out the sound of thought

Subvocalisation is the term for that voice in your head when you read. I've never been able to get rid of it, and trying to has always resulted in me feeling like I'm skimming rather than reading.

yes, that is the secret.

"reading" is not one activity, there are 100s of ways to read.

I think a way to practice it would be through math exercises. You don't really voice out '3 + 8' as much as 'three plus eight'. Also thinking further I think books directed at children would probably also help, I feel like complex terms keep me subvocalising when reading.

I wonder if the same is true for languages where the writing system is not a representation of sounds, like written chinese.

My understanding was that written Chinese has a great deal of phonetic information (even though it is not exclusively phonetic like the alphabet or Japanese Hiragana/Katakana). I had understood that many ideograms essentially could be interpreted as topic + pronunciation: e.g. 驰 could be interpreted as "the word about 马 horses read as 也 chí".

At least one of the Chinese languages is tonal too, so the same sequence of vowel and consonant sounds can have totally different meanings when spoken at different pitches. (The humorous example is “grass mud horse,” which is a bit NSFW and a great act of someone thumbing their nose at censorship.)

I wonder if native speakers have a greater emphasis on subvocalized pitch, or if that’s even a part of subvocalizing? Paying attention to my own internal reading now, I suspect that it is.

English is my first language, but I find that when I read in Mandarin, I can focus on intonations, personality, etc or leave it out as sort of monotone.

The intonations that give the characters their meaning are so engrained in the flow of the sentences it can feel monotone, as it is just the way it is said.

If I am reading a poem or idioms I usually like to over emphasize the tone like a classic theatrical reading because it’s fun and helps me remember what I read.

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