Atwood rebuttal: Mandarin Chinese programmer communites
odwks.com
odwks.com
I think that's a very important observation. One's mother tongue determines one's thinking. I'm a native Chinese currently studying Computer Science in Canada. Although I have no problem communicating in English, when it comes to complicated cases, the logic engine in my brain seems to work better if it thinks in Chinese. Another interesting observation is that I always count numbers and do arithmetic in Chinese---I received my primary education in China, which hard wired my brain in certain ways. Plus, English numbers are just too irregular to express decimals properly (by comparison, Chinese numbers are extremely regular and match positional notation perfectly, e.g. 12,345 will be literally pronounced in Chinese as "one 10,000, two 1,000, three 100, four 10, five". )
Another defect in my English thinking process is that I can barely come up with proper phrases or expressions for unfamiliar abstractions. I guess in order to name things properly requires one to have very deep understanding of the culture and its history, which takes a long time for non-native English speakers. (e.g. There used to be an async-IO library for highly concurrent web servers in Python called Medusa. I got the idea for the name immediately, but if I were to name it myself, I'll never come up with such a smart name. )
That said, recently I noticed that somehow my brain starts to re-wire itself and certain ways of thinking in English become more natural. But that's the result of years of reading related stuff in English only, which is certainly not the case for many Chinese programmers.
I stayed in Taiwan for education until I got my Bachelor degree and served military service. I forced myself to read textbooks in original version and I read a lot outside textbooks when I was in high school. I spent first 3 months in U.S. to count number in English reflexively. And so far my problem is that if I remember anything in English, it takes me time to translate them back in Chinese. Like every time I told my mom and sister about my phone number, I need to think how to say them in Chinese by going through all numbers that in my mind are pronounced in English. But I can type in exactly the digit as someone else said. Another thing is I have problem to perform physics calculation in Imperial system because all physics constants that I remember are in Metric system.
Another problem is to explain knowledge in Chinese that I learn first in English. Especially terms in computer science are not unified in Taiwan and China.
At the other hand, I read both Chinese and English media. But it seems there are two brains in my head that are complete separated. I am also ambidextrous to the degree that I can write in both hands and using chop sticks in both hands. So maybe my brain did not develop specialization well as others.
I have the same problem, too. A much worse thing for me is that I use English as my primary language for quite some time now, I sometimes have difficulty finding the appropriate Chinese words when I need to talk to Chinese friends. I guess that's the price one has to pay if one really wants to re-wire the brain :|
"I am also ambidextrous to the degree that I can write in both hands and using chop sticks in both hands."
This is quite an achievement. Is it a born gift, or you trained yourself? Very amazing! :)
But some friends noticed that I always unconsciously switch hands when picking up trash on the floor or opening doors. They mistook me as left handed. And you read from Wikipedia that a theory of ambidexterity is that most ambidexterity are in fact left handed by birth. So maybe I just forget my unhappy experience during the right handed when I was kid.
What I find more amazing is how people think it is unbelievable; I once felt like a circus animal in demonstrating it is possible to my friend.
Everybody is "ambidextrous" (at least in regards to common motor tasks) to varying degrees. It's up to you to control this degree. A highly-trained violinist has a more functional left-pinky (more than the right pinky), for example.
Another interesting thing about lefty and righty-ness, is that some people make the observation that lefties cross their arms and their fingers opposite of righties (e.g., left thumb on top for lefties). I reasoned that this was just habitual, so I deliberately changed mine, and over the years the "lefty way of crossing" is the most natural one.
Altho' my mother tongue is an Indian language, I think _natively_ in English now. I think its a matter of time and exposure.
In my first programming job, several co-workers were Chinese and amongst themselves usually spoke Mandarin. At a programming competition I attended a few years ago, several teams were from Quebec and most of them spoke French within their team. All these people could speak English, but chose not to because they were more comfortable speaking their native languages, even about technical issues. I think this is pretty normal, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
use the right _language_ for the right job
English is better than multi-language
Although multi-language is often better than *only* English
Practicality beats purityYeah, like that's gonna happen.
As for computer science, learn it in English, because that's the language it's written in. Whatever anglocentric or *centric it may sound, it's the way you will get most out of it, it's that simple.
http://kjctech.net/blog/archive/2009/03/31/stackoverflow-is-...
Claims that Jeff and Joe were approached by the guys that built the China clone to StackOverflow and that Jeff and/or Joe didn't want a Chinese version. Their loss for believing the world is flat.
It's exactly the same thing for spoken languages. I'm french, and i learnt English, German, and a bit of Spanish. Once you learnt one, you can learn the others more easily, not only because of your mind adapting to other languages, but also because those languages share a lot, be it from a vocabulary perpective or from a grammatical one.
I'm no expert in asian languages, but from my past in linguistic and ethnology, i aquired the strong belief that theses languages are different enough to really "wire" your brain differently.
And you must also take into account the cultural penetration of the english/american culture into a country. Even if this penetration happenned everywhere, Western Europe has much more exposure to this culture than , say , China.
The bottom line is : French people will probably never need a french StackOverflow as badly as Chinese people.
The world is not flat !
It seemed to me like the point of the article was that your communication is at its most efficient/natural in your native language, instead of English for example, if it's not.
I just thought it was obvious.
Well i think you're quite wrong to put all languages on the same level here.
Every language is someone's native language, so they're on the same level as far as that point is concerned.