Sure, ask this while I'm sitting here with a Linguistics text studying for a final. This post is going to be a bit long. Empathy is a hard word to bring up an

Sure, ask this while I'm sitting here with a Linguistics text studying for a final. This post is going to be a bit long. Empathy is a hard word to bring up an image of because it's meaning is largely connotative rather than denotative. On the other hand, there are many words ('Book', 'Clarinet', 'Web Browser', and all the other things I can see from where I'm sitting) for which it's simple to form an image. The words are largely symbols which denote an entity. Now to drift from the topic: I think in either my native language (English), or in images. Flashes of insight tend to come as images. Generally the hardest problems I work on are design situations rather than algorithmic, so I think images are the best way for fully formed answers to pop into my brain. I'm also unilingual. Canadian English is the only natural language where I regard myself as being fluent. I speak some French (Quebecois), but by and large it's parroting full phrases when I speak. My reading comprehension is sufficient that I can interpret arbitrary French when the vocabulary is in my limited lexicon, however my grammar is quite weak when it comes to forming new phrases. My formal education in French was poor, as I was taught essentially arbitrary vocabulary by non-fluent teachers. All through high school I read French in much the same way as you speak Spanish, by treating another language as something that I was just lacking the mental dictionary for. I lived in southern Quebec for a couple of years while attending University. Though it was an English town and school, a fantastic amount of the signage was in French. Some time ago a friend and I were driving through Montreal. More accurately he was driving and freaking out about the traffic, I was navigating and translating the road signs for him. Having been exposed to French road signs for a couple years I'm competent in that area. I realized that I wasn't translating into English in my head when I started getting frustrated at how _slow_ it was to translate the signs to him. I would read them, have to find the equivalent concept in English, and then say it. In the end I just started directing him where to turn instead of reading him individual signs. The layer of indirection doesn't last forever. One day I'd like to be able to speak the language like I can read the road signs.