[hsn915]

I learned English for school material (math, physics, etc). I then learned further while taking Computer Science at University.

I can watch full length videos on any topic from physics to philosophy to politics and understand nearly everything. But I have a hard time following casual conversations about small daily life things.

Further more, I can only think about programming and technology in English. If I have to talk about technology in Arabic (my native language) I basically have to think about it in English in my head then translate it to Arabic.

[the_af]

Something similar happens to me, but it doesn't seem to be related with how logical/math-related English is, but rather the context in which you've learned it.

If you had learned Chinese (or Portuguese, or whatever) for your school material and computer science courses at university, you'd probably think it's Chinese that's "purpose built" for logic/math.

English seems to me a very illogical language, see for example the pronunciation rules compared to a more "logical" (pronunciation-wise) language like Spanish. Or Japanese, I hear, though I wouldn't know about that. Written English can feel similarly illogical very often.

[comte7092]

I think that’s more of a reflection of the fact that English is the dominant Lingua Franca for those subjects.

When you’re at the cutting edge of research, it’s inevitable that you are going to have to come up with new words/language to describe new concepts, and so that process has been happening in English for decades.

It’s a fairly common phenomenon that languages assimilate words from other languages as new concepts are introduced by people who use that other language.

So I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that English has some sort of superior utility for expressing scientific/programming concepts, at least not innately. It’s just that it’s more fleshed out after being used so heavily for such over a long time.