How do multi-linguists and animals think?

Everytime i speak in spanish,I think about it in english. Like when i say for example,Correr. When i say that,In my head it'll repeat itself as "run" in english.
You will basically always convert your other languages to your native one.
My username may suggest im mexcian thus spanish would be my main language but im actually not very good at speaking spanish. Im not bad but im not fluent

 

Yeah same goes for me, but I don't really think it in my head as I'm saying it. For example I can speak some German, so when I'm talking in German I'm thinking in my head "ich bin peter" means "my name is peter" I just know it. It's a really interesting thing to talk about, and I've always been interested about it.

 

ive always wondered about this too... like when you think "ich bin peter" is that the same as when i think my name is peter... But do our minds see it the same or different way... Like 1+2 = 3 but you might think 3+0 = 3... so we get same answer but different sort of :S

 

Even speaking in German to myself I don't really think about it in my head because I just know it. It's hard to explain, and you have to be able to speak another language to understand what I mean.

 

Yeah i'm not particularly like that. I guess that is possibly the difference between being fully bilingual and simply knowing some of the language. My native language is spanish, however when I talk in english or do anything with english in it, I think in english as well. It's just as if I hit a switch and everything in my mind was english.

It's pretty curious, because i've noticed a few times that when i've got that 'switch' activated on english, if I hear someone speaking spanish, since my mind is still in 'english mode' i'll try and understand what they said as if they spoke it in english so i'll be like 'wtf did he just say' until my brain realizes it's spanish and switches to thinking in spanish and I can at last understand what was going on.

Sounds like a complicated process but it happens in a fraction of a second.

 

yer ive tried learning another labnguage but would lead to me having to think about every word very hard... otherwise it just comes out at english

 

You don't need to "narrate" your thoughts. This is generally called sub-vocalization, where you actually associate a word with a concept. It is generally believed that people subvocalize exclusively in their native language without a lot of training (like nate said), but that doesn't mean you have to subvocalize at all.

Silencing the "inner voice" can lead to much faster thought processing. For instance, it removes the need to communicate with the Broca's area of the brain. People who are training to speed read are training to remove sub-vocalization; instead, they can read text and simply interpret what the words mean without using standard language as a medium. Yes, they are still reading in a given language, but that doesn't mean their brain is understanding it directly as a language. You can train to do this same thing with thought, and most people already do on a subconscious level.


For some anecdotal evidence, I have learned to process thoughts without subvocalization, but that doesn't mean it's always. For instance, one time I was at a museum watching a production on some feature they had. The lady behind me was translating it to her daughter in spanish. After a few minutes I realize I had stopped listening to the movie and was relying on her translation instead. I'm not an expert, so I don't know if I was subvocalizing the Spanish or just picking up on the language because a second language is actually stored in other parts of your brain than your native tongue is. Anyway, it was kind of cool to realize what was happening, though I'm not sure if it answers the question at all...