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

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?

Comments

[Antonio Radovcic]

English all the way. I find it uncanny to read about CS-topics in German. Just feels weird.

[mlaj]

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.

[Arber Braja]

Whenever i find code commented or with function names, variables written in different language then English i curse the developer :p

[Fulton Browne]

as a english speaker, what does french code look like?

[Gabriel Laroche]

For example
getUserData();
would look something like :
chercherInformationDeLutilisateur();
Basically, everything is just way longer.

[Gabriel Laroche]

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.

[David Dal Busco]

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:

const signophiles: boolean = true;
if (signophiles) {
   this.tableauDeBord.lumiere = 'orange';
}

🤣

On the other side, reading a technical book where the explanation are provided in French makes it faster and easier to understand for me.

[mlaj]

On a fait la même technique, a la même école!

On s'habitue vite en anglais a force de travailler a tous les jours 😊

[Gabriel Laroche]

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.

[sayujraghav]

Native is Hindi and Malayalam. But i am comfortable with English

[mt3o]

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.

[Alexis Benamar]

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.

[Michel Renaud]

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

[Davide Bellone]

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

public class Prova {
public void FaiQualcosa(){}
}

is fine for me, because it makes obvious that the code is not meant to be used in real life.

[Higor Rossato]

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.

[Ninso00]

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).

[Jérôme Gamez]

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 😅

[manuel]

Same for the Scandinavian countries. I like it.

[simonebogni]

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 😅

[Arber Braja]

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.