Ask HN: Do you think primarily in English?

My point is that I already know what I'm going to say in my mind, but there is no reason to actually hear my brain think them. Basically I go through 3 steps in my thought process:

1. Think or conceptualize,

2. recite what I've thought to myself (in my mind, in English of course),

3. process what I've just heard myself think and act on it.

My question is this: why is step 2 necessary? It would be faster just going from conceptualization to processing, wouldn't it? Maybe it's a habit from reading at a young age when I sound the words out in my mind as I read.

As far as the whole needing to describe empathy, thats just a lack of vocabulary...you don't know the word for empathy, so you try to describe it with other words.

As far as thinking in one language, that's not that uncommon, I'm fluent in 3 languages, and know 2 so-so, but the voice in my head is set to the language I use most in my day to day life. Sure I can switch to another language on a whim, but it takes an extra effort.

But in everyday thought process, I do think in Hindi or English.

I find that the "voice in my head" speaks different languages at different points in time. While programming I use mostly English. I find that sometimes when stuck on some programming problem, trying to explain/talk about it in another language often "unsticks" it. No idea why, really.

It can be really annoying at times. I constantly mix up proverbs and language constructs when I'm context switching, I often know a word in only one of the two languages and can't think of a good translation, and so forth. And more often than not there is no 1-to-1 correspondence between English and Dutch words, so it's easy to get frustrated knowing exactly what you want to say, but being unable to say it because the words don't exist in your native language.

I don't think it matters much whether you think only in English, in several languages, or in pictures/emotions. A game I sometimes played as a kid was to take a concept and repeatedly think of more succinct definitions for it with a friend. And the cool thing is that despite getting the original definition wrong, in the end you always end up with a definition both parties agree on. People rarely think about the exact definition of any every-day word, and yet people are capable of intuitively picking the "right" definition from a list.

To completely derail this thread I'll challenge you to define the word "chair". It's not "something you sit on", because you can side on a couch and a couch is not a chair. Nor is it "something you sit on with legs", because then it could be either a stool or a bench.

The point is, when you think of the word "chair", you're not thinking in English. You're thinking about the concept chair, and that's one you can't define without some effort. And defining it in words is completely unnecessary because you know what a chair is. It's no different for the word "empathy".

ps: Your definition empathy doesn't pass the sociopath test. A sociopath notices somebody else is hurting, and knows what pain feels like, which is for your definition sufficient. But textbook sociopaths lack empathy. So empathy must be more than mere recognition of an emotion. Yes, this is nitpicking, but that's kind of the point.

I'm also learning Chinese. It is anything but an easy language to learn, I'll say, and I don't feel like I'll be thinking fluently in it anytime soon. That being said, if I concentrate and force myself to think in Chinese I can get by with a huge hit to rate of thought. It's something I practice from time to time despite the frustration.

Empathy is a hard word to bring up an image of because it's meaning is largely connotative rather than denotative. On the other hand, there are many words ('Book', 'Clarinet', 'Web Browser', and all the other things I can see from where I'm sitting) for which it's simple to form an image. The words are largely symbols which denote an entity.

Now to drift from the topic:

I think in either my native language (English), or in images. Flashes of insight tend to come as images. Generally the hardest problems I work on are design situations rather than algorithmic, so I think images are the best way for fully formed answers to pop into my brain.

I'm also unilingual. Canadian English is the only natural language where I regard myself as being fluent. I speak some French (Quebecois), but by and large it's parroting full phrases when I speak. My reading comprehension is sufficient that I can interpret arbitrary French when the vocabulary is in my limited lexicon, however my grammar is quite weak when it comes to forming new phrases. My formal education in French was poor, as I was taught essentially arbitrary vocabulary by non-fluent teachers. All through high school I read French in much the same way as you speak Spanish, by treating another language as something that I was just lacking the mental dictionary for.

I lived in southern Quebec for a couple of years while attending University. Though it was an English town and school, a fantastic amount of the signage was in French.

Some time ago a friend and I were driving through Montreal. More accurately he was driving and freaking out about the traffic, I was navigating and translating the road signs for him. Having been exposed to French road signs for a couple years I'm competent in that area. I realized that I wasn't translating into English in my head when I started getting frustrated at how _slow_ it was to translate the signs to him. I would read them, have to find the equivalent concept in English, and then say it. In the end I just started directing him where to turn instead of reading him individual signs. The layer of indirection doesn't last forever. One day I'd like to be able to speak the language like I can read the road signs.

Some of the other students seem to not have this problem. By their own admission, they're able to operate in many, if not most, contexts completely in Russian-- though, of course, there's no way to know what this means. They mention dreaming in Russian, for instance. This hasn't happened to me yet. There are times when I can intuit what someone wants without actually translating word for word, but usually that's just because I didn't catch all of their words to begin with.

It might be background-- I'm the only engineer, the others are all Russian majors. Maybe they have less need of precise rules and translations. It's very hard for me to adopt a new Russian phrase without having found an English equivalent for it. It might be time spent learning the language. The other students have been at it 2, 3 times longer than I have. It might just be that I'm older: 30, as opposed to 22, 23. When I was in the Peace Corps, the volunteers in their 50s and 60s had huge problems learning the local language. So it's probably true that, at least for most people, the older you get, the more ingrained your modes of thought. I guess that means that the earlier you can expand this, the better.

Later, when I was much older, I realised that parts of my thinking seemed to be words - but just seemed. With some effort, it's possible to remove the words from the thinking and just think in concepts - the words are automatically placed on your thoughts, but you are not thinking in them.

Let me explain again : You have a thought, and then the words matching that thought are created. Then you reprocess those words as input. You can also skip the reprocessing step, but for that you have to avoid a fatal mistake - the replacement for words is not images. Rather, you need to simply not try to inteprete the concepts you are working with in your head.

For example, if I say 'empathy', you know what it means without a dictionary definition of empathy. If I write out a sentence - the man felt empathy with his begging son, you can imagine the situation without needing words or pictures, and only when the entire concept is finished do you convert it into words. I.e, in the sentence above, you are not breaking empathy down, you are breaking the entire sentence down.

There is a simple way to discover how to do this - think of some random object. Then think of something related to that object, then something else related to it. For example Book, Page, Letters, Reader. And so on. Just go through a list of interconnected things, but as you do so, try actively to avoid putting words on the concepts. After a while, also try not putting pictures either. You should see your thinking speed up significantly as you improve.

My personal perspective: I am natively trilingual, as an Indian person. (someone else mentioned this as well.) My two Indian languages have fallen to near-complete disuse, to the point that I'm only borderline fluent in them. Nevertheless, growing up with two or more languages forces a child to seek common denominators, and thus think in terms of imagery.

This is definitely the case for me. As soon as I focused on the word "empathy" for a few seconds, I actually had two different images come to mind. These were both exemplars, as in, specific instances of people in my life showing empathy, one from recent memory and one from long ago. That's the trick with imagery -- it can often be crude, and only cover a special case of the concept, but it still does the job much better than words. You mention precision. Precision can in fact be a disadvantage, given the inherent ambiguity of human thought.

This is learnable. It gets harder as you age, but never impossible. To improve thought imagery, try this. Buy a ginormous whiteboard and cover one wall of your room/office with it. Draw everything. You might initially have to struggle with coming up with any sort of image. Your perfectionism, and your poor perception of your drawing skills, if you suffer from those, might hinder you. Try and lose your inhibitions. When you're at your computer, keep looking at the whiteboard once in a while. You want to get to the point where if there's a concept you're working on over a few days, every time you think of that concept, you should immediately be able to see the corresponding picture in your mind's eye. Also keep reams of paper around. Again, draw everything. I'll even start drawing on napkins if a thought comes into my head that I need to draw and I can't find paper. Hopefully, you will eventually be able to 'draw' effortlessly in your head.

Here's a solution for your "lookup table" problem. This is a technique that is used in teaching accents, but I have also used it in learning new languages. Pick a character. It could be a friend, or a character from a TV show, just anyone who speaks Spanish (preferably exclusively). When you're trying to speak Spanish, be that person. Imagine you're them, to the extent possible. It will make it a lot easier to push the English out of your head.

Finally, subvocalization (i.e, reciting sentences to yourself). Also (un)-learnable. Start gliding your eyes over the text rapidly. At first, you won't understand anything. Try the same sentence again. Force yourself not to say the words. If it's too hard, go fast enough that you can't possibly say the words. Keep doing that until you derive at least some meaning from the sentence. Start from there, and hopefully you'll get better slowly.

These are all things I've used to various degrees. Thinking in English is not a big problem for me, but more imagery helps, no matter what. YMMV, but hope this all helps!

When I was younger, I would think in Spanish and occasionally dream in Spanish. I don't do that any more. I've been in the US for so long that the transition to thinking in Spanish requires effort.

But, yes, there are concepts and shades of meaning in one language that are hard to communicate in the other.

I think that being monocultural is much more constraining than being monolingual, however. When you grow up between separate cultures, you're not only acutely aware of multiple ways of talking. You're also acutely aware that there are multiple ways of living, of relating to people and family, much different sets of priorities, completely different ways of problem solving and of being. It's hard to appreciate unless you've made a big cultural transition like emigrating or growing up multicultural.

If you want to get past it, move to another country for a couple of years.

As for myself, I think mostly in pictures and concepts, very rarely in words.

I am bilingual, but since I rarely use words for thinking, languages don't matter as much.

I sometimes only know English terminology on a subject and I am forced to think and even use English words.. I consciously try to avoid that. Usually people with only ostensible knowledge of English AND the subject pollute their native language with unnecessary foreign words. Unfortunately those people are very common here and annoy me daily, but on the other hand its fairly easy to separate the signal from the noise by looking at how often such fancy words are used.

I really recommend this essay in which the unnecessary use of foreign words is only part of a bigger problem: George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

I know this quite well, because I grew up with a mother language quite different from my current language (both are not English), so learning other languages (preferably really different from your mother tongue) is always a mind opener.

I made this experience: while slowly growing into my 2nd language/culture, I extended my horizon, without loosing what I learned so far. So, it's not that I'm now inside my 2nd language, and lost my 1st experience/capabilities, but: my horizon is widened, I'm more logic and more flexible in both languages, and in my whole thinking process.

BTW, I never explicitly think in the words of my human language, words may accompany the thinking process, but thinking is so complex and fast, that you would not be able to follow directly; it mostly 'happens'...