[Causalien]

As a multilingual speaker (English, Mandarin, French, all fluent) who eventually let English take over as my main language here's what I think.

If you learned two languages since birth you develop two language sites. I read somewhere that the Wernicke's area is divided into two if you do this as well. Perhaps auditory memories are triggered based on language as well. You think and have internal dialogues in different languages which triggers completely different memories. This explains why one might lose one language, but keep the other one.

Whereas, for learning languages later in life, a person tends to translate the new language into the main language. The internal dialogue is always in the form of the main language. The memories are one contiguous experience based on one language. Often, when self examining during meditations, it is hard to make out what language is used. This explains why a brain problem will wipe out sections of speaking ability across all languages because they are all eventually translated from the main language.

Like people who started with C, we tend to think in C and see how new languages add on to C and just remembers the new rules of the new language relative to C instead of having a completely new life experience from ground up of learning the new programming language.

In short: Bane said: "I was born in darkness, you simply adapted"

[nobodysfool]

I think you can come to false conclusions quite a bit if all you are basing your research off of is your own intuition. I learned Russian, and as a native English speaker it was difficult, but I can think in Russian, and I don't translate Russian into English in my head. There are some things I say in Russian that I would have no idea how to properly translate into English. The first programming language I learned was basic, but I don't think 'oh this in python is like x in basic'.

[pasquinelli]

taking it to computer languages seems iffy to me. i started with basic, and in no way do i think in basic. in fact, i wouldn't say i think in any particular programming language. if i were to venture a guess, i would say this is because no computer language is anyone's first language. when we write a program, we're reducing our entire natural reasoning about the program into abstractions that fit the language we're using, and then translating those abstractions into actual code.