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Comment by aragonite | Hacker News Reader

In my observation of non-native speakers working & living in the US (a group to which I belong), there's also something special about number-words. If you are a non-native speaker, even if you boast near-perfect English pronunciation and fluency, and are accustomed to using English in all aspects of your life, not just for communication but for e.g. personal note-taking, and even if you haven't spoken/written your native language with anyone in months, the moment you need to count (a sizable enough collection), or you need to enter on your computer a numerical passcode received on your smartphone, you (most likely) find yourself reverting (in your (sub)vocaliztion) to the number-words of your mother tongue, because doing the same thing in English just feels so much more cumbersome.

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My impression from having asked people about this exact problem—I meet plenty of recent immigrants here in Paris—is this goes away quickly if you have to, say, work a customer-facing job where handling money is part of your duties, but much slower otherwise.

(Of course, you can also simulate that experience by drilling this for ten minutes a day until it becomes second nature.)

Not really though in my personal experience. You only need to learn conventions about how to say currency values out loud because you enter the numbers at a register and it presents you with a total that you read out like, "That'll be twenty-one oh seven," or, "twenty one dollars and seven cents please." All the money handling and change making you do in numbers in your head.

This! Internally it's still not-English, while the result can fluently and easily be said in English.

I do find however that it also depends on "when the number was remembered". For example, relatives phone numbers I remember in my head in non-English, as I learned them in that language. But my credit card number I recite in my head in English in order to write it out on order forms.

And numbers for calculating and such for a very long time was still non-English but I think it's habit. In my head, nobody tells me "Sorry dude, what language is that? I can't understand a word" and so there's never any real incentive. It's also faster to do that part in your first language and only say the result out loud while thinking about words (especially entire sentences) in your first language and then translating and saying it in English makes for awkwardly long pauses or really bad sentence structure. I think that provides again more incentive to learn English sentence structure and to think in English to begin with, so that words come out "right away" as you think and formulate.

(as a native English speaker who has spent some time in India) I have such a hard time thinking of numbers in terms of Lakh and Crore, I find even if I can remember the number of decimal places represented by each one, I almost have to visualize the number and move the commas in my mind to be able to make sense of them.

Similarly the only knowledge I've pretty much entirely forgotten about Hindi is the way the digits are written. Even going years without reading or writing in Hindi, the muscle memory comes back pretty much immediately for everything except for the digits.

Technically Hindi would be my mother tongue, but I wonder how all that plays out in terms of having initially been raised with it, then having entirely forgotten it and replaced with native level English for a few years, and then having relearned Hindi from scratch. I tend to think in a mix of both languages, and have a tendency to mix words from other languages into my thoughts too if I'm exposed to them often, even if I can barely speak those languages.

Chinese also splits numbers differently than English. In Chinese it's every 4 digits, instead of every 3 digits as in English. There is a word for 1e4 (萬), 1e5 is 10萬, 1e6 is 100萬, 1e7 is 1000萬, and there is a word again for 1e8 (億).

same for japan. ju hyaku sen man

As a native English speaker, I speak primarily Spanish in my day to day life (Spanish speaking wife and children) and have done so for about 15 years. I’ve had to purposefully build relationships in -both- languages in order to feel normal when speaking English with them.

I can’t even describe the absolute weirdness of saying “I love you” to my wife after building our relationship over years in only. Spanish. There is definitely some kind of personality disconnect when I learn language and culture by immersion as an adult.

And yes, numbers are problematic. Spanish me really, really, really sucks at math. Even trying to do basic subtraction or calculate a trivial tip ends up with internal translations to work out.

As a bizarre aside, Once in a while I can be nudged into a temporary unresponsive state by the right timing of a language change by my speaking partner.

When I “snap out of it” it’s like the words went into a que but nobody fetched them so I went into some kind of waiting condition. It’s really weird and makes me wonder if there might not be a lot of ways to trigger altered states through similar hacks.

I am a non-native speaker living in Australia, I have been here for 12 years now; my experience is that this eventually goes away. Until about 5 years ago I was experiencing the same as what you are describing but now it no longer happens. I suspect that the timing depends on one's age, for example I moved here in my 30's and my progress was much slower than my daughter who moved here very young. Another factor is the relationship between your native language and your acquired one, for example I have observed that people whose native tongue is an Indo-European language don't have as much of a hard time switching to English compared to people from other linguistic backgrounds.

Does it have to do with syllables?

I use English mostly (and am certainly a native English speaker), but use my mother tongue to memorize numbers, as mine (Cantonese) has single syllable numbers. I think I can keep 5-7 numbers in short-term memory in english, whereas I think it's closer to 10 or 12 in Cantonese.

I don't think so. Neither my native nor adopted tongues are English. My native tongue actually has more syllables than the adopted one, for some lowish numbers. Yet, I still count in my native tongue, e.g., when counting the reps while lifting weights.

I'd say I speak better my adopted tongue than my native one. People from my country say I speak with an accent, while locals are surprised to learn I'm a foreigner, since I speak with no accent. When I think about things, I also use my adopted language (I went to school here, so it's easier, since I've learned the concepts in this language). Hell, I sometimes use English for my internal thinking. Just not when counting or adjacent tasks.

Linguist John McWhorter has a fantastic course on human language on The Great Courses / Wondrium / Audible.

He specifically talks about this! Apparently the spoken word, the written word, song lyrics, and numbers are all processed in different parts of the brain almost as if they were different languages. He even mentions the same phenomenon as you and I think he also said this is the first part that gets hardwired into your brain as a kid, leaving you stuck counting in your mother tongue forever.

I've encountered that as well. Someone at work tells me a number of something to check in English, I have to write it down. I can't even see the number in my head. It's the complete opposite if someone tells me say a phone number in Polish. I lived less than a year outside of the US since October 1981.

What was emigrating from Poland in 1981 like?

Like the "Coffee, coffee, coffee" scene from "Moscow on the Hudson", I guess. And also very lonely with all their friends and family left behind.

I don't want to be off topic so in short you come-up with a plausible reason for travel to then Yugoslavia which takes you by rail through Vienna and spend time at Traiskirchen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traiskirchen#Refugee_Camp_(Bun...

Hijacking planes was another popular route.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOT_Polish_Airlines_Flight_1...

Incredible - they guy got his freedom. These stories are as inspiring as they are tragic.

Unbelievable. Glad you made it.

Interesting. There's something about this.

Two days ago I was jump roping. Sometimes I was (mentally) counting in English, sometimes in my native language. I'm not sure which one I did more often, but when I paid attention, I noticed that I made fewer mistakes when counting in my native language. An explanation would be that my brain can do that more effortlessly. Despite the fact that I lived in the US for longer than I lived in my native country.

While I don't belong to the same group, I've been working remotely for a bit over 2 decades now (not continuously at first, but yes for the last 15 years) so on weekdays I do end up speaking more in English than in Spanish (my native language) with other people, and I definitely have the same issues you mention with number-words.

I'm not sure if it's related but a similar thing happens with spelling. I guess because there's some ordinal relation to the letters in a word? But I feel whenever I need to spell my name in English it takes me about the same mental effort as giving my phone number, and I'm otherwise rather fluent in that language.

Sample size of 1, but I don't think in my mother-tongue anymore, and also don't count numbers in my mother-tongue and find them harder to recall at this point. But I don't speak/listen to it anymore, so that probably influences it.

I'm Dutch, my first language was Dutch, my second language was German and my third language was English.

I count and do all my numbers in English, UNLESS I am in The Netherlands and I have just been talking Dutch then I do it in Dutch. I do not switch to Dutch even internally for my internal monologue when I encounter numbers.

I live in a non-english speaking country and sometimes go days without english at all even though its my native tounge.

I agree, the one thing I tend to still do literal translations in my head for is for numbers and arithmetic. Its just so much more cumbersome mentally for some reason to do the math in my non-native language.

Numbers in many languages tend to be harder to internalize, yes. Numbers in Danish are a whole other level, thou.

Consider e.g. the number 157. That'd be 100 + 7 + ((-0,5 + 3) x 20), only that they don't pronounce the "x 20" because then it is too long.

It might depend on whether you do a lot of counting in your non-native tongue. Since I studied maths in English (not my native language), I also do counting in English when I'm thinking in English because to me counting in English is just as easy as in my mother tongue.

I have been learning English for close to 18 years by now.

I still can't count in English.

For me it's the ten hundreds or similar way to call the thousands. It's something that I have to picture the number in my mind and then translate it to the equivalent in thousands.

If you think English counting is bad you should see French!

This happens to me not in my native language but in the language in which I learned mathematics.

Eh. Once I start dreaming and thinking in a non-native language, the only things I revert to native on are things like philosophy where extra cognitive load actively hinders my thoughts. Numbers/money aren’t really expensive in the same way.

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