My "mother tongue" is English.. though I used to speak another language when I was small as well.
My school tongue was Spanish.
I did college in the US, in English.
I taught CS college in Spanish. It takes some adjusting to find the right technical terms that are often mistranslated.
I work both in English and Spanish interchangeably at a daily basis. I think in both languages interchangeably with ease. Though I more readily curse in English.
Most of the world is at least bilingual. We often treat it as something odd, but its actually the norm. But it used to be that people were made to feel ashamed for knowing another language (maybe still so) in some places. Monolingualism is rare. Most my African friends will say when asked that they know only 2-3 languages, but then if you ask more carefully they'll say they know another 2-3 "dialects" as well (which often are full local languages from different families). I'd say monolingualism is mostly in the US and maybe a few other places (even in the US its getting rarer).
But often it matters what your professional language is. I learned math in Spanish, so I didn't know how to pronounce "logarithm" when I went to college.
Similarly in Spanish I didn't know how to say "library" (as in "Java libraries") since in Spanish the convention is to mistranslate it to "librería" (when it should be "biblioteca" if you want to translate correctly). There were similar difficulties with words like "hash table" ("tabla de dispersión" I found in a book). Or "procedural programming" ("programación procedual" which is impossible to find almost anywhere). I find reading technical material in Spanish frustrating since the translators often mess up.
You touched on something (tangentially related) that I have also been thinking about more now that I'm older, and that is how media shapes our perceptions, at least it did more when I was younger. Because we got a lot of American entertainment on television when I was a kid, it seemed as if the "outside world" = "America" but the truth is most of the world is not America, and so much more diverse and interesting than what we were exposed to simply through media.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
My "mother tongue" is English.. though I used to speak another language when I was small as well.
My school tongue was Spanish.
I did college in the US, in English.
I taught CS college in Spanish. It takes some adjusting to find the right technical terms that are often mistranslated.
I work both in English and Spanish interchangeably at a daily basis. I think in both languages interchangeably with ease. Though I more readily curse in English.
Most of the world is at least bilingual. We often treat it as something odd, but its actually the norm. But it used to be that people were made to feel ashamed for knowing another language (maybe still so) in some places. Monolingualism is rare. Most my African friends will say when asked that they know only 2-3 languages, but then if you ask more carefully they'll say they know another 2-3 "dialects" as well (which often are full local languages from different families). I'd say monolingualism is mostly in the US and maybe a few other places (even in the US its getting rarer).
But often it matters what your professional language is. I learned math in Spanish, so I didn't know how to pronounce "logarithm" when I went to college.
Similarly in Spanish I didn't know how to say "library" (as in "Java libraries") since in Spanish the convention is to mistranslate it to "librería" (when it should be "biblioteca" if you want to translate correctly). There were similar difficulties with words like "hash table" ("tabla de dispersión" I found in a book). Or "procedural programming" ("programación procedual" which is impossible to find almost anywhere). I find reading technical material in Spanish frustrating since the translators often mess up.
You touched on something (tangentially related) that I have also been thinking about more now that I'm older, and that is how media shapes our perceptions, at least it did more when I was younger. Because we got a lot of American entertainment on television when I was a kid, it seemed as if the "outside world" = "America" but the truth is most of the world is not America, and so much more diverse and interesting than what we were exposed to simply through media.