Ask HN: How do non-English speakers learn programming?

We learn English first.

This is one of the reasons I roll my eyes whenever my fellow Americans tell me that the United States school system is doing just fine. People in the United States are all too insulated from the reality of people in many other countries having to learn everything we do, including literacy in a native language, to make a living, AND having to learn English to a good standard of literacy besides. Yes, people in other countries often take university-level classes in a variety of subjects with the same English-language textbooks used by American students at the best American universities. (There is, of course, a thriving business in those countries of cram books of those subjects and digests of those textbooks in the local language, and also many excellent textbooks in the local language in many countries.) Moreover, a lot of people in a lot of parts of the world converse in their parents in some historically traditional language of their country, but do business and make jokes with business colleagues in conversational English.

I'm an American who spent several years of my life learning Chinese, among other languages, and who has lived in non-English-speaking places for about six years of my life and worked for quite a few years in the United States in translation and interpreting. It never stops amazing me how much people in much of the rest of the world just roll up their sleeves and learn English, after learning two or more other languages beforehand, to pursue their personal goals.

It does not matter. I do not think English has anything to do with the ability of programming. Not all native English speaker can code, similarly there are many non-english speakers who are great programmers.

To use English seemed to be easier than to use native language. First you know your native language. Then you need to learn programming. Programming uses symbols which don't make sense - except as concepts in programming. So you just learn that "while" is a loop with condition, and "print" makes letters appear on the screen. "While" doesn't, for example, associate with time, only with condition; "print" doesn't evoke images of a printing machines, newspapers or anything else. No semantic confusion whatsoever; to the contrary, if that would be written in the native language, it would immediately bring associations, which may be unwanted.

A few comments to above. Some words are already used in the language, so, knowing how a certain combination of English letters is pronounced, one still gets some associations. "Function" is a rather international word, for example (brought into English from another language?). Next, learning first some programming helps with learning later English itself. For many words first associations remain related to computers; e.g., "performance" (though not widely used in programming languages, but it is used in technical manuals) is first for a processor, not for an actor on the scene.

I learned English mostly by being a teen programmer. It helped a lot, gave me a reason to become proficient in English as the whole ecosystem is obviously in English as it's lingua franca.

I think you'll find this link very interesting, "Symbology, APL, and Chinese Python" http://clouddbs.blogspot.com/2010/09/symbology-apl-and-chine...