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comment by wijwij
wijwij  ·  2894 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Dear Hubski, what language do you speak?

I'm a native English speaker from the US, and did terribly at foreign language classes in school.

Later in life, I spent 5 or so years learning Mandarin (speaking, reading and writing, traditional and simplified). I still speak it everyday and lived in Taiwan for years. Learned a bit of Taiwanese Hokkien, mostly for the food.

Recently moved to the Philippines for work and have to speak a little Tagalog, though most people in the business world here speak great English.

A new language in always in context, and you gain some new personality traits with it. My Chinese expression is more precise and logical than my English, partly because I lack the rhetorical skills to bullshit so I can't really afford to. My (very basic) Tagalog is entirely focused on making friends and diffusing tense situations, because rolling with the punches and making friends fast is an important life skill in the Philippines.

For non-human languages, I do data analysis by trade and have a very different approach to programming than traditional software engineers. I tend to use and write in the functional rather than the imperative style. Examples include Scala, R, and some uses of Python. When working with new developers, I usually spend some time introducing the paradigm and why it can help data driven products.





Ay-Nawn  ·  2892 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    A new language in always in context, and you gain some new personality traits with it. My Chinese expression is more precise and logical than my English, partly because I lack the rhetorical skills to bullshit so I can't really afford to. My (very basic) Tagalog is entirely focused on making friends and diffusing tense situations, because rolling with the punches and making friends fast is an important life skill in the Philippines.

I really like how you've described this element of how you experience the different languages you've picked up.

Would it be appropriate to say that your mindset when jumping into the other languages shifts as well? Into said "personalities" that don't necessarily equate when you jump into another linguistic mindset?

wijwij  ·  2890 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes, I would say that's fairly accurate. It comes with time as well, it will take a day or two to readjust to a language context you haven't been in awhile -- the cognitive load of those first couple of days is very high.