The language of learning

Monday, February 8. 2010

I just put down "Testing Computer Software" after having read a few pages and thought "Why the heck haven't I even thought about buying this book in German?". Apart from the fact that I try to get the original (at least if it's written in English) because I have seen too many bad translations already, I kind of feel that it might still hamper my learning.

Going on from this point it rarely occurs to me to take notes in German if the topic I'm going on about is computer related. I have been reading, writing, hearing and speaking English for about 20 years now and assume that my command of the language is close to a mother tongue speaker but "close to" is not equal.

I wonder if I used German books and notes for my technological learning processes if I would pick it up quicker.

If you read this and are not a native English speaking person, can you observe something like this in your learning process? If you are a native English speaker have you ever tried to learn a technological topic using your second language?

Posted by Markus Deibel in Connected to testing!? at 08:00 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Most of the books I buy are in english. During university I got used to reading english. Over time this has become my favorite reading language, although I'm a native German speaker. Recently I observed that I can't stand to read about software and technology in German any more. The more professional articles I read are in a too complicated German language and surely don't follow the-simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work principle. I wonder if this is an advantage or impediment.

#1 Markus Gärtner (Homepage) on 2010-02-08 08:23 (Reply)

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