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Comment by st1x7 | Hacker News Reader

> While your language skills can be more than adequate, not being able to fully structure your surroundings through language might leave you feeling alienated; not a part of the society you live in. Or perhaps you are perceived as rude or socially awkward for using the wrong words in the wrong emotional context

I experience this in reverse. I'm more fluent in English than in my native language so when I need to communicate with people from my home country, my speech sounds like a poorly worded translation from English (which it is in a way). It's a very strange experience.

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Haha yeah it’s pretty awkward to be having a conversation in my native language, in my own country where I have lived almost my whole life and suddenly want to say a word and only remembering what the word is called in English.

This happens me from time to time for whatever reason. And I’m not even an expert in English. I guess in my case it comes from reading and writing a lot in English even though the language I speak to others with my mouth the most is by far my native tongue.

I know this feeling all too well. I find that the internet in my own language is very low quality compared to online content in English. If I go to a bookstore, probably 70% or more is translations of books originally written in English. So I prefer to just buy the original on Amazon. There are entire subjects I only "know" in English. Every once in a while, when having a conversation about one of those subjects, I just can't find the right words in my language. I think it happens to a lot of people here and everywhere in the world.

Affirmative. I started having problems talking about my profession at the university, since everything I read was in English, to the point the teacher complained because I was mixing English and my native language. This experience however exposed to me to the fact that I did not want to talk about my profession in my native language, because all the important stuff is in English (software development).

It’s infuriating when the word does not exist in the other language, so you search and search and end up just constructing something with several words.

Does not even need to be a complex word: cheap for example does not have a word in french, you need “pas cher” (not expensive) or “bon marche” (~good deal)

We all forget a common word from time to time.

I guess if you have backup word stored in different part of brain, it gives you more options.

I get this too. I moved from France when I was young and after more than two decades spent in England speaking French is often quite challenging and frustrating.

I’ve made a point to start reading in French again and to make efforts to at least write in French a little every day to get back into it.

An acquaintance of mine of German origin had lived most of her life in the US. She spoke fluent and unaccented German but said that when in Germany, she preferred to speak English because she was so out of step culturally that it was easier to be coded as a foreigner than a time traveling native.

I experience this too, especially in technical discussions where everyone involved had learned the concepts in English originally. There is this peculiar feeling when you exactly know what the original English sentence was before its garbled version got uttered in your common language.

"Liebe Alle"

"Macht Sinn" (makes sense) is almost a legitimate phrase already and "Der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm" (The early bird catches the worm) might be soon.

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