Do you feel comfortable learning in your own language or do you prefer English? (For non English-native speakers)

Native Ukrainian speaker

I am studying English and German. So for me easier to learn those languages in my mother tongue, but when I practice them I feel more fluent, rather than when I'm just reading rules and new words

Native spanish speaker, my english skills aren't good enough but I feel comfortable watching tutorial in both language, most of the time I watch courses in Spanish.

Learning concepts in mother tongue is helpful,but coding in English.

Learning and coding in portugues (which is my native language) feels wrong to me. Personally I hate having to write mixed languages like:

const opcaoHabilitada = true
if (opcaoHabilitada) {
  console.log('goto hell')
}

It's so much strange reading in my head "if (Opção Habilitada)". not to mention I can't use the right accents and signals and stuff you append to letters like "ç" and "ã". Not only it feels wrong, but I'm also writing wrong portuguese, which gets on my gears

Native Persian speaker here.

Actually learning computer science and coding stuff in Persian is quite difficult and complicated for me. (Also same for many of my friends and colleagues). Because lot's of technical words got translated to Persian.
For instance, in some books "Secured Cookie" translated as "شیرینی امنیتی" it means "Secured Actually cookie (sweety)" and so on.

Reading English books, articles or even watching English video tutorials is much better than my original language.

Native dutch speaker :D

I often explore topics or technologies that aren't covered in class. It's extremely hard to find anyone that can help you if you're stuck when all your code is in dutch.

Yes it is still possible for people to help you but the 'why' or the goal of some things take more time to explain and a bunch of people often don't really want to take the time to understand.

Native Italian speaker here, and I'm with you. Vastly prefer English.

I'm a native Spanish speaker like you. I also speak English but I've been using it on every day basis since almost 5 years ago (I'm currently 41), and like you, programming using Spanish words seems odd. I think it has to do with the languages and documentation as well. Programming is a very english-ish world.

Native Spanish here. While I feel odd programming in Spanish, I'm comfortable taking programming courses in my native language. If the platform is good, they program in English and even encourage you to read the English documentation and (of course) learn English.

I'm also Spanish and feel the same way. Not only are there much less tutorials in Spanish, but they're also more confusing when they try to translate the english written parts of the language to Spanish. Now I don't even bother to look up the tutorial's name in Spanish and go straight to English

Native german speaker here! 👋

Same, same! I have always learnt coding stuff in english - has happened kind of automatically, 'cause yeah, all coding language itself is in english, and of course the documentation is also.

But still, sometimes it kinda feels like I gotta do doubled work: not only I have to understand the technical parts of a programming language (tools ...) I also have to look up words and phrases I don't understand to get the whole context of .... whatever!

Soooo, sometimes I'm kinda jealous of native english speaker. Just a tiny-tiny-bit.✌️😄😅

Italian native here and I totally agree with you.
I learn best in English and I like to code only in English. It doesn't make sense to me to translate it.

This is a big question. I'm part of a team that is translating the software- and data-carpentry lessons into Spanish and other languages. I'm Spanish and code in English since a very long time, as probably almost everyone who is a member of this community[1]. However, I still think the translation of that material is very important. Many have asked us why to "waste" our time with such translations, suggesting, as many of the people commenting here, that "real" code should be written in English. These courses are aimed at young researchers, normally when they are starting their PhD. If we can do anything to ease their path to get used to the tools that will make their life easier while producing a more sustainable software that helps to open science and replicability, then why wait till they learn English, or why to enforce them to learn the hard way the tools while they don't know English?

I would prefer to read and work with a code in Finnish that's readable than having something bad in English. The problem becomes when there is no consistency and a mix of languages, then you don't know whether the abbreviations used by the previous developer are in one or the other.

[1] Maybe you would get a very different result if you survey this on non-English universities and/or companies.

Hi Nadine,

Bulgarian here.
I feel exactly like you described it.
Long time ago I realized that code, also code comments and documentation - everything should be English. You never know who will maintain your code in the future and it does not matter if he/she is a native English speaker - English is somehow a standard for the dev world.

Nice "did you know" mention for Python:

In the latest Python versions you can write variable names in whatever language you want (unicode variables), so this is possible:

тодор = 3

Nevertheless, the recommendation is not to use this feature :)

Catalan speaker here.

Apps need to be well localized for the users, but code must be in English IMO.