I am native Spanish speaker, although English billingual. However, taking coding courses or classes in Spanish feels odd to me.
I think that part of it is due to that I have always learnt coding stuff in English. And another part is that all coding language itself is in English, and of course the documentation is also.
It feels really odd to hear the name of the functions translated into Spanish. And I also think it is not practical at all, since documentation does not translate the names.
What about you? What is your native language and how do you feel about learning in it?
Nadine M. Thêry
Posted on
Do you feel comfortable learning in your own language or do you prefer English? (For non English-native speakers)
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Oldest comments (50)
English all the way. I find it uncanny to read about CS-topics in German. Just feels weird.
Native french speaker here.
Programming in French is horrible, since every programming language are written in English. We've had many problems at work with Rails auto-pluralize because of French words that look like English words.
I was forced to program in French on school, and I switched to English as soon as I could. Some government agencies here are still forcing employees to code in French tho.
Whenever i find code commented or with function names, variables written in different language then English i curse the developer :p
as a english speaker, what does french code look like?
For example
getUserData();would look something like :
chercherInformationDeLutilisateur();Basically, everything is just way longer.
Yeah, coding in french is truly horrible (also had to code in french at school) but I feel like sometimes, some concepts are easier to understand when they are in french. But I will never code in french ever again.
I'm agree with you. Coding in french just burns my eyes from the inside 🔥
Fun fact, when I jump into a french car I often ask my self "did the car manufacturer developers coded some stuffs in french here?" like:
🤣
On the other side, reading a technical book where the explanation are provided in French makes it faster and easier to understand for me.
On a fait la même technique, a la même école!
On s'habitue vite en anglais a force de travailler a tous les jours 😊
Malade! c'est sûr qu'on s'habitue vite! C'est juste que des fois, c'est un peu plus facile de lire de la doc compliqué en français.
Native is Hindi and Malayalam. But i am comfortable with English
I'm from Poland, native language is polish. I prefer to learn in the language that is closest to the topic. And for some topics, I prefer using both languages at the same time.
When reading about software development, English.
When reading press or about taxes - PL.
When reading about business, both, because I need to be aware of all naming conventions.
I find that native language can be useful when learning at an early stage, elaborating ideas and/or writing pseudocode, as it can faciliate the understanding.
But when it comes to programming (for development or production environments), English should be the standard choice, as the tool we use are built with it and some language could mess things up.
Native French speaker. I don't think I've taken any classes in French since university and even at home I do my programming stuff in English. It just feels more natural. Back in the mid-80s I barely understood English, so of course it was all French.
I'm learning Croatian and set my native language in the app to "English". Now, THAT I think may have been a mistake. lol
Well, at the very beginning I think that native language can be a good choice. But most of the tech jargon is in English, so for "real" projects it's best to use this language.
For simple test projects (just to try a library or a functionality) I prefer my native language (Italian), since I don't have to think about reasonable names.
However a
is fine for me, because it makes obvious that the code is not meant to be used in real life.
Native Portuguese speaker here! I personally prefer English. Mostly (if not all) projects you'd work it's in English so the sooner you get used to terminologies in English, the better.
English all the way for me! Reading in my language (Slovak) would get me absolutely nowhere, even our teachers here give us english books. No-one bothers to translate and by the time they do, the technology might as well be out of date (Says allot about my country, no-one cares here, people just go with the flow).
I don‘t want to contradict you, but looking back I wish the publishers (books, movies, sitcoms, etc.) in Germany hadn’t translated almost everything into German.
Had it been like I perceive it to be e.g. in the Netherlands, where I’ve seen most movies and sitcoms in English with subtitles, I think my English would have gotten better sooner.
So, even if a country doesn’t care, I believe it is good in the long run, because you get closer to English faster.
Well, at least as long as Mandarin doesn’t take over the spot of being the predominant world language 😅
Same for the Scandinavian countries. I like it.
Same for Italy, that's also one of the reasons why we are soooo bad at English. Plus, after starting to watch all the movies in their original language, I must say that that it's really terrible to watch one where the language spoken doesn't match the lips movement of the actors 😅
If you mean reading and learning regarding programming topics, i can speak well italian and english, almost on the same level but whenever im watching tutorials or reading programming related topics, always prefer English.
Polish native speaker. Since I'm self taught and back when I started there wasn't much information available online in my native language nearly all the learning and coding I'd done has been in English. Early on in some personal projects I might have used Polish words/phrases for variables or function names. But generally even then talking or reading about the programming concepts felt weird when done not in English. I still cringe upon hearing some of the "creative" translations done in this field.
My native language is Dutch but learning technical subject in my native language can be quite annoying. Most of the terminology used online is English. To understand what you are reading in Dutch, you often have to translate terminology to English in your head. Same as with other tools, like Photoshop, which I just cannot use in Dutch as the Dutch translation simply doesn't click with me.
Using English terminology is also beneficial when looking for help or information online. Most of what you will find is in English anyway.
This is the reason I never set the language to my native on any software I use. Translation tend to be confusing, and it's nearly impossible to google any errors.
I've thought about this in the past and wondered if i was alone in this. Turns out most of us feel like English is the best language for code.
I'd try writing in my native language [Papiamento], but then only half a million people on the planet would be able to read it lol :)
Well, I am kinda like you. I am a native portguese speaker and although I am far away from being fluent in english I feel way more comfortable with English than with Portuguese. It's easier to find English content and I like the flow of the language.
Also, you have to use accents (à,á,â,ã...) in Portuguese and that sucks. So programming and looking for content in English is way more comfortable for me.
I am native Czech speaker. I have been using Czech language (without diacritics) to name things for a long time. I didn't mind the combination of languages. But the time has come to be compatible with colleagues. I program in English only now.