Linguist: No matter what language you are thinking in at the time, do you still do simple arithmetic?

Question

in your mother tongue. I know I do.

Answer 1

I think everyone does. It's the acid test of whether you are a native speaker of the language or not.

Answer 2

It was the hardest thing for me to cope with when I moved to Germany. I practiced simple arithmetic in the foreign language until I could do it in my head without using my mother tongue. You have to translate the number word to a number figure and then do something with it, rather than translating it to another number word and doing the math.

In other words, if you hear zwei plus drei in German:

Instead of doing this in your head:
zwei is two
drei is three
so it's 2 + 3 = 5
5 is five
five is fünf

Do this:

zwei is 2
drei is 3
2+3=5
5 is fünf

Get a kids arithmetic gadget like the little professor and practice in the language you want to do the arithmetic in. It is something that is forgotten in most foreign language teaching methods I know.

I worked at it so hard when I worked at a fast food drive-in I could add up three or four menu items in my head and give the customer the total without being at the till (like when there were only two or three people working and the kitchen staff took the orders and the counter staff completed the transaction at the window).

Answer 3

In English I do. However, numbers are not absolutely essential in human languages. Some of the world's languages have no number words beyond three. The Pirahãa language of Brazil has no numbers at all. Our own Stone Age ancestors in Central Asia twenty or thirty thousand years ago probably spoke languages with no numbers too. We can tell from reading Medieval texts that numbers and counting were not as important to people living in Europe during the Middle Ages as they are to people living in modern Western societies. The change occurred between the 14th and 17th centuries starting with Renaissance Italian bankers and accountants.

Answer 4

There have been open brain surgery recognition experiments on this matter in southern France, and hand/screen reaction time experiments on this performed in Italy.

They have also compared the reaction times of professional simultaneous translators.

There seems to be a switch responsible for what you are talking about, and when they did MRI's, the people that spoke more than one language "light up" more, and in different places, but the drawback was a very slight (in the 100ths of seconds) delay in performance between the monoglots (one-language people) and the polyglots (more than one-language people).

The monoglots make quicker determinations based upon language.

Answer 5

Simple Arithmetic? For God's sake, I'm dealing with Statistics and you say Simple Arithmetic?

Answer 6

Beeing native French and German (dad German mom French)I grew up in both countrys I still do all arithmetics in French though I could do perfectly in German if I wanted to.

Answer 7

im native italian speaker and despite speaking fluent english (and helping my kids doing maths in english!) and still need to count in italian inside my head, especially when i multiply! lol, good question tho..