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What language do you think in?

A combination of Sanskrit, Aramaic, Hieroglyphics, and mostly English.

I know about as much Spanish as I do French and/or German, which is not much of any of them especially not enough to think in any of them.

My daughter is learning Spanish from one of her day care teachers so I find myself learning it from there and I don't really necessarily translate back to English any of what she says anymore. Of course it's limited to colors, numbers, and a few animals.

I'd like to learn a foreign language more fully and my wife and I have talked about taking classes, but with a toddler and one on the way I doubt we'll find time in the next few years.
 
On the rare occasion that I am blessed with the gift of "thinking", it's not in words but in, well, thoughts. Images kinda.
I communicate with myself on the lowest level of.... something.
Language is only required when speaking to another life form.
 
Vader said:
I think in English.
I tried to think in Spanish outside of spanish class once and just got confused.
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It's considered a major breakthrough in learning a second language when one actually dreams in that language. Truly bilingual/+ people do think in either language though. Por lo menos, pienso asi.
 
Thought about it - I think in English and also in music - is that possible? Been playing guitar for years, now taking piano lessons - music running through my head!!!
 
English, my Grandfather spoke and thought in Maori, but didn't teach his kids to speak it because he though it was a dead language and wanted them to fit in with white people better.
 
English, as I've only ever lived in an English speaking country. If I'm in a French or German speaking country to do tend to tune in after a day or so, and think in French and German, but my French and German isn't very good, so my thinking is a bit more limited. :eek: It does make me want to learn those languages better though.
 
This is my first post...
I'm Italian, but it's a long time that I've been living in other countries (France & Germany), so I only rarely think in Italian (just when I'm talking with other Italian people). Taking a shower, I usually think in French... During the day, depending on who I am talking to, German and French... very rarely Spanish (it happened a lot when I shared my life with few Spanish people, but now we only have occasional contacts...)
 
Usually I think in images, concepts and things like that, but if I have to verbalise things, I think in Norwegian or English depending on who I want to communicate with. If I think verbalised thoughts to myself, it varies if its Norwegian or English, but mostly Norwegian. I sometimes get lost for words in English and can only think of a Norwegian word, and also vice versa. Well, sometimes I just get lost for words no matter what language.
 
Just asked my Norwegian girlfriend, and she usually thinks in Norwegian, Danish or English, but she is know to speak Swedish in her sleep though :D
 
zephead said:
I asked my Spanish teacher this one time, and she thinks in Italian, but always speaks English and teaches Spanish. :eek:
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Similar to that, I think in Spanish when I'm in Italy because my Spanish is much better than my Italian. It's easier to translate Spanish into Italian and back on the fly than it is to do the same with English.

Otherwise most of the time I think in English, although if I'm speaking a language a lot because of where I am or I'm listening to foreign radio, I'll think in either English or the other language. Whatever's easier.
 
I speak and think in English....

this raises a pretty interesting point though - if you think in a specific language, what happens when you don't yet know a language? take babies for example. how do they process thoughts without being able to speak a language?
 
wimic said:
I speak and think in English....

this raises a pretty interesting point though - if you think in a specific language, what happens when you don't yet know a language? take babies for example. how do they process thoughts without being able to speak a language?
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people usually remember, think and process using their hearing (internal or external), or language - its called echoic memory. however, deaf people, and i would presume babies, bypass the "language" component and use visual images to think.
 
normally german but from time to time i catch myself thinking up answers to german questions in english simply because i read/hear so much english during my studies (computer science)
but that mostly happens when it's more trivial day to day talk and not very specific stuff ...
 
i used to ask this question a lot of bilingual people. then i lived in france for a year (having learned "book french" in high school and college, which didn't prepare me nearly enough as i'd hoped for actually living there :p ) and found that it's not so much thinking in another language but the language of your primary response to things around you. for example, if i see i book i want to buy, i don't completely verbalize in my head in any language "oooh, i want to buy that book". but articulating that to someone else will depend on the context and language that's "predominant" at that time. an example - i had just returned from france and was staying at my dad's house temporarily before i moved to the midwest for a new job and he was trying to wake me up (i love to sleep in!) by opening up the blinds in my room. i didn't actually think coherently in any language in my head about what he was doing, but i asked him to close the drapes in french and didn't realize i had done so until he turned me with an extremely puzzled look and asked me what i just said. then i thought back on what i had just said, realized it was in french, and then repeated it in english for him.

i found that when in france, i would never default to english when speaking french - if i didn't know a particular expression, noun, whatever, i would try to describe what i meant in another way or somehow bungle my way around the missing vocabulary. from this and other things like the example with my dad above, i concluded that speaking a second language is not on-the-fly translation in your head from your first language - when you become fluent, it's immediate articulation in that language. i thought that was pretty neat. the one area where i have always had a hard time though is writing - i do still translate from time to time what i'm trying to write from english into french. iirc from college psych, this involves a different part of the brain, which most likely explains the difference in processing where more practice would improve writing fluency.
 
wimic said:
I speak and think in English....

this raises a pretty interesting point though - if you think in a specific language, what happens when you don't yet know a language? take babies for example. how do they process thoughts without being able to speak a language?
Click to expand...

You use instinct and images. Most anything concerning communication is likely about want or need at that age.
 
I think in elvish. :D
Actually, I think that nobody actually thinks in a language, but our minds translate what we're thinking into whatever language we speak.
 
Well, English is my primary language (and really my only language, as my command of French is minimal), so I do my thinking in English, although back in the day when I was taking French lessons and actually had some competence in the language, I was able to think in French a little bit.
 
What language does someone born completely deaf think in? Sign?
 
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