What language or languages do you ‘think in’?

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Buondì.

Here’s a quick follow up to last week’s article ‘How people handle multiple languages at the same time‘ inspired by Anne, who emailed to ask what language a bilingual person thinks in when he or she is alone.

By the way, if you have a question about, or an allergic reaction to, this or any other article, much better NOT to email me (I’m busy caring for Bug so might ignore you) but to ‘post a comment’ on the relevant article.

How to do that? Locate the article you want to write about on our website by clicking on the Recent Articles link. Once you’ve found the right one, click on the title, then scroll right down to the comments box.

Fill it in, press the button, and be patient, as your words will need to be moderated (an anti-spam measure) before becoming visible. All genuine comments will be published, however daft. Your email address is required but won’t be visible. Fake one if you’re privacy-minded/paranoid.

Anyway, I replied to Anne that it was a fascinating question, but a false one. She didn’t agree, but then she’s been writing to me for a decade and never has yet.

My reasoning, based on forty years of language-learning experience and thirty-plus years of teaching, goes like this…

Human toddlers (say children aged between one and two years) don’t yet speak, but are certainly ‘thinking’. The respond, they decide to ignore warnings, and you can totally see in their cute little faces, and obvious body language, whenever they’re pondering doing something naughty.

‘Thinking’ about engaging in something forbidden is certainly happening, yet no human language has yet been acquired to ‘think’ in.

N.b. for the childless amongst you, when toddlers are about to do something really, really bad, they wait until you’re not looking, ideally when you’re busy in another room, then go very quite. It’s a tell. For toddlers, silence equals plotting, language or no.

Insomma, it’s obvious that even if two-year-olds don’t have the language to express their thoughts, they still have thoughts. Rage, boredom, affection, wanting something, and so on.

That’s not so different from dogs, actually, which are also inclined to urinate in inappropriate places and similarly don’t express their needs and feelings in words. If you’re a dog, why bother learning to speak? Doting humans will figure out – with a little trial and error – what you want.

Which reminds me, there was a famous medieval emperor, Federico II, known as “stupore del mondo” (1194-1250) who was as fascinated by language as we are. But Federico, being an emperor, could experiment on newborns – denying them any spoken input or contact with their moms – with a view to waiting until they could speak in order to discover which was the true ‘language of God’, the sort of question that was top of the agenda in medieval times.

What happend? Find out (free text + online audio) on our History page, here: Il Medioevo, Episodio 20, Federico II, “stupore del mondo” (1194-1250).

The History page, by the way, has one hundred and fifty-one other ‘history’ articles, which are all FREE to read and listen to. They cover the two and a half millennia beginning with the origins of the Roman Empire and ending with more recent happenings, such as Berlusconi, and the euro. Read/listen to that little lot, then come back and tell me your Italian hasn’t improved some.

Back to my reasoning regarding Anne’s question about which language or languages bilingual people ‘think’ in, and still with the dogs. Have you one? And are you a native English speaker?

Then I propose that your pet will, to a greater or lesser degree, respond to your commands/imprecations in English, but perhaps not in another language (try them with Italian and let me know!)

And yet your pooch acknowledging ‘Sit!’, “Good girl!’ and so on is no evidence that she’s ‘thinking in English’. Just that she’s thinking, as with the toddlers.

There you go then, Anne: language learners don’t think in any human language, not their mother tongue (tongues for bilingual people) or their foreign language or languages, no more than toddlers and animals do. They just think. English, Italian and so on doesn’t come into it.

Looking for more on this, I came across an article on Wikipedia, which describes a theory about how we really think (not in words): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_thought_hypothesis. It’s well worth a look. You’re excused. Go learn something. Come back here when you’re done.

Ready? Bene. Anne’s question, while not logical or scientific, is at least firmly-rooted in language-learning folklore, which you probably knew, as teachers and learners say all sort of silly things.

For instance, prominent in Google’s results for ‘thinking in a foreign language’ is this Reddit discussion: Thinking in another language, which begins with this question:

“I was told that I would not be able to learn my second language because I don’t think in it. I’m still learning it, I can’t think in it for the most part. But is he right?”

Predictably there are a lot of people saying how important it is to think in the language you’re learning, many others lamenting that they try but can’t, and very few contributions involving common sense.

One exception, from way back in 2016, comes from TrittipoM1, whose profile description is: “Retired lawyer, learner, translator, & teacher. Fluent English, French, & Czech. Usable Italian; survival Mandarin”:

“”…in general, most effective language acquisition proceeds in a kind of spiral of automatization of ever-increasing scope.

At the beginning, you make a few social niceties — greetings, names, basic state of being — automatic. You don’t need to translate from L2 to L1, formulate an L1 response, then translate the L1 back to L2, you just practice enough that you recognize the L2 input, and an appropriate L2 response becomes automatic. At the next level, you add in some other domains with typically predictable variations, and _those_ become automatic — no need for translation, you recognize what you hear, and you respond. And so on.

Ideally, you never need to translate anything. You simply expand in a spiral the range within which you don’t need to translate…

…”Thinking in” an L2 doesn’t mean anything more than making some recognition and responses possible within the L2 itself…”

Thanks TrittipoM1, that’s very helpful!

For non-language-teachers, by the way, L1 is your mother tongue while L2 is the language you’re learning or have learnt, that’s to say your ‘second’ language as opposed to your first. It’s jargon, obviously.

Nonsense aside then, there are language-based activities that might approximate ‘thinking in a language’, most obviously writing.

Learning to write your own language is painful enough (remember?), and slow, because what we’re basically trying to do is encode, at a tender age, our ‘language of thought’ in writing, with the idea that the results will more or less approximate speech.

Making a phone call is a lot easier, but when I was a lad, calling grandparents and aunties to thank them for birthday/Christmas gifts was too costly, so I was required to learn to write, like it or not. “Dear Auntie, Thank you for the present” (what was it, Mum?) “I hope you are well.”

In some languages (English, for example) the ‘output’ of writing is often similar to speech, even if the process is completely different (speaking is automatic where writing is laborious). That’s not true for all languages, though.

I can understand and speak some Turkish, but find both reading and writing it very hard, as the normal patterns of speech are much simpler than written text, which is all complicated and back-to-front.

And of course, pity Japanese teenagers, who while being as sullen and smelly as kids in Italy or your country ARE STILL LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE at the age when their western peers are having fun experimenting with drugs and trying to lose their virginity.

Other areas in which you might, sort-of, be thinking in language?

What about acting, at least when you have lines to say? Or reading poetry aloud? Or sermonising, or giving a speech?

Though if you think about it, they’re all ‘performative’ in some way, so very different from ‘normal’ language use, as well as from day-to-day ‘thinking’.

Conclusion: when it comes to language-learning, it’s a dumb idea to try to ‘think in Italian’ when Italians certainly don’t (I asked some before writing this).

It’s unhelpful to worry that you can’t ‘think in Italian’, or despair that perhaps you never will. At best that’s demotivating. At worst it’s very misleading.

Language-learning just isn’t like that. It’s not a question of ‘thinking’ in anything, but of getting plenty of ‘input’ and engaging with it.

Read, listen, speak if you have the opportunity, write if your mother says you must. Then wait for the magic to happen.

Alla prossima settimana!

2025 Back to School Sale: Ebooks for Language Learners -25%

(Published yesterday at our ebooks store site)

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P.S.

And talking of how to ‘think in Italian’, here’s a reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.

Don’t translate it. Don’t study it. Just listen to it and follow along with the text.

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE. It’s funded by donations. Every couple of months we ask satisfied language-learners to pony up, so we can keep publishing the thrice-weekly bulletins. Enough of them do. Find out who, here: https://easyitaliannews.com/many-many-thanks-to/

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week -on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

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