Native? Polish. In a way I think German also qualifies since my mother is and was often talking in it, even when I was basically picking up the speech as an infant, but it's a language that I can rarely (if ever) exercise. I have learned some Czech from my neighbour who was also my piano teacher and I happen to know a bit of Swedish that was enough to confuse a true Swede if you don't mind that exaggeration ;). Polish as a native language makes it very hard to get used to puns. We have very little to show when it comes to homophones and homonyms. Plus we don't really have prepositions like 'a', 'an' or 'the'. In Polish you use suffixes and context to signify whatever preposition does. It makes most foreigners scratch their heads since word like "Michała" can mean (depending on context) "Property of Mike", "Made by Mike", "Mike's" or "Feminine form of Michael that functions here as a name of a person". Plus it seems that every qualifier I'm making is strong as it can get in English while in Polish it would be more context-sensitive. UTF-8 :P. Otherwise the above example will look like complete crap. This is weird, but bare with me: I'm rarely using words when I think of something. It's more of a matter of connections between shapes, sounds or memories. When I think "Cat" I see a picture of one, a picture of encyclopedia entry on one as a literal picture etc. I'm rarely using sounds for anything in my head. I have problems with differentiating people by voice etc. I don't know why, but it's a lot of like library in my head. Most of the time when I talk, as you could see in the recording you referenced, I have long and mostly silent pauses. That's my brain trying to interpret Devac's Headspace(TM) to speech. Plus I was nervous as hell which does not help much. Bit artsy/autistic description, but that's how it seems to work for me. If I 'hear' myself in the head it's usually the language I'm focusing on. If I'm learning/speaking English, it's English etc.what coding
Do you sometimes think in this language, rather than your native tongue?
I get the impression that English's lack of signifying prefixes/suffixes regarding gender or people, for example, is part of my difficulty learning other languages with seemingly more complex grammar. Kudos. I can attest to a similar experience. More so a collection of loosely related ideas or flashbacks in sequence rather than words per se. Ah, yes. This always is fascinating to me. To learn a language to a point that your brain (or you) can encode and interpret information in a form other than your native or preferred medium.It's more of a matter of connections between shapes, sounds or memories.
If I 'hear' myself in the head it's usually the language I'm focusing on. If I'm learning/speaking English, it's English etc.
Well, to be fair Polish (and many other languages) has/have both byzantine grammar and forms that are alien to English speakers. This article is weird to read as Pole, but I can kinda dig it at least in terms of "why could that be so complex" explanation. Edit/arseshelter: just to make sure we are on the same page, I don't think of Polish as the hardest language or agree with quite a few things in article itself regarding difficulty assessment. It's largely OK as presentation of one point on it being hard, but I do recognize how people learn in different ways and speeds. To me, Spanish is too hard and makes so many weird rules about pronunciation that even German and French seem almost sensible (and I remind you, one has umlauts and another seems to need each vowel in at least two or three flavors). Portuguese? No, thank you. I want at least one consonant that sounds like I know it ;). The point is: article shows some difficulties and should not be considered as authoritative. Or that I wanted to present it as such. I don't think that's that. Let me try this one: Back/return, Here/there, is/are, It, Me, Go, Good/bad, Where, Stop, For, If/else, While, I, You, There, Just, Get, Up/Down, Left/Right, Not/No and counting to about ten is enough to be very expressive. You should know enough programming to know how much you can do with just that :P. That's why knowing just a few gestures + hand alphabet allows deaf people to communicate so quickly. You probably need a solid understanding of as little as about 50-80 words to convey the core meaning nine times out of ten. "This not nice, it look bad", but you don't need some fabled Fifth Conditional (the preposterous case, describes a negative probability of occurrence) or 20$ adjectives to get to the core of information. It's not hard to reason on a "Simple English" level of Wikipedia. I think on a Simple Swedish and Simple Czech level, only add some more stuff from time to time. With time, it could actually become something around fluency, but unlikely to ever get better than my English. Which on the other hand sucks compared to my Polish.I get the impression that English's lack of signifying prefixes/suffixes regarding gender or people, for example, is part of my difficulty learning other languages with seemingly more complex grammar. Kudos.
Ah, yes. This always is fascinating to me. To learn a language to a point that your brain (or you) can encode and interpret information in a form other than your native or preferred medium.