> I can not recall ever feeling like my thought processes or understanding of the world were fundamentally different to my monolingual colleagues. As a native

> I can not recall ever feeling like my thought processes or understanding of the world were fundamentally different to my monolingual colleagues. As a native German speaker I, for example, for consider thinking in German (regarding the case system that is deeply ingrained into this language) very much like thinking about types in a type system in a programming language; you have to pass an object [pun intended] of the correct type (genus) to a function/predicate so that the code compiles/the sentence is grammatically correct. This kind of thinking does not work in English because of its different grammatical structure. Another example: it is very common in German to analyze words part by part to find "sometimes hidden meanings"). Just one trivial example: "entschweben" [to waft away]: if you analyze the construction of this verb, you see that this is the verb "schweben" [to hover] that is modified with a prefix "ent-" that changes its meaning. This prefix thus works like some higher-order function that modifies the functionality of some existing function (in programming) - or in the given case of language, the meaning of a verb. So, one can really say that how I, as a native German speaker, think about my native language daily often corresponds to quite non-trivial programming concepts. When I attempted a similar analysis of English words to English native speakers, they soon cut me off and explained to me that "this kind of analysis is not how English works or how English native speakers think about their language".