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Comment by calini | Hacker News Reader

I'm bilingual, people keep asking me what language I think 'in', and I don't think I think _in_ a language.

For lack of a better way of describing it, I rather think in concepts, sometimes the voice in my head likes to play along by imagining the words representing those concepts, sometimes in English, sometimes in Romanian, but the words are not necessary.

In dev words, I guess I think in structs and then optionally serialize those structs in En/Ro (JSON).

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I'm bilingual and I can switch my permanent internal dialogue to one language or another, and It happens automatically if I'm actively using it for a few minutes. This afternoon that I've been on HN for a while I'll think in English, probably until wife comes. In dev words, I could say the same as you, but maybe the serialize phase is not optional.

I'm bilingual (having learned English relatively late - in school), and i think in both languages. I think my mind language depends on which one I'm immersed currently (work/browsing internet: English, real life meetings: my native one). I have very long internal monologues in both languages picked unconsciously/randomly, and sometimes switching.

Another fun quirk is sometimes I remember that I've read a sentence, I can "quote" it, but I'm not sure if I've read it in my native tongue or in English. I guess my mind sortes them in a language independent way sometimes?

The mind prioritizes information over where it obtained that information. It's a frequent cause of accidental plagiarism.

I am not bilingual but rather can speak fluently in some foreign language. However, I constantly find myself thinking in the foreign language I know, especially for topics I learned from reading in foreign books.

Another simpler example is when I count I usually count in my native language, even in a specific dialect when I was taught very young!

I speak three languages (none of them fictional, fortunately) and I've found thinking or expressing certain concepts come easier in one of them vs. the other two.

My only interest in becoming polylingual would be to compare these "thought structures" among them, first hand.

I am the same and would say it could be a form or side effect of aphantasia.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

Same here... Am also bilingual, and I seem to think in language only when I think _about_ language, e.g. when I plan what I could say or write. Otherwise, it is concepts or images.

Same here. Also bilingual, also never related with people who think in sentences. It's all abstract bytes until it needs to be formatted and output into a specific language.

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