Firstly, I'm deeply envious of anyone who is genuinely bilingual. I've worked pretty hard, and still only have a smattering of other languages. I've never really had the chance or reason to develop fluency in anything other than my native tongue, so cherish your ability. You probably can't - from the inside - realise quite what advantages it bestows.
And that's my second point. Many of you are saying that you don't think it's significantly affected your ability to multi-task, but you can't know. This is why science demands proper double-blind randomized trials. You don't know what you would be like without your bilingualism, so you don't know how - or if - it's affected you. Maybe without your bilingualism you'd be a lot worse at multi-tasking. Or a lot better. You can't tell.
I have various skills, and I believe that some have helped, and perhaps some have hindered, my programming, but I certainly can't tell.
In my personal experience, I won't easily switch between languages (it takes on or two seconds at best), but when I finished switching I am 100% focused on it. I don't think about the other languages except when a concept can't be properly expressed in the current one.
In computer terms, it's more like a fetching a page on the swap on a page fault than accessing several contexts at the same time.
I guess translators would be more aligned on the model presented..But how common would it be?
> In my personal experience, I won't easily switch between languages
For me the trickiest is switching fluently between the sound systems of several languages in a split second. Suppose I'm speaking in American English and mention a double-barreled word like "Stern-Brocot tree" which contains a German and a French name. In that context it's very difficult to maintain proper pronunciation even though I can pronounce the parts perfectly well individually.
In those cases I usually try to pronounce the words with an accent of the language I'm speaking in, rather than the way they were in the source language. Sometimes this actually takes more work if I know both languages, but I find it makes me more understandable, and helps keep me mentally "in" the language I'm speaking. For example, if I mention an American city while speaking Greek, my instinct is to pronounce it as in American English, but it's more colloquial and easier to understand if I pronounce it with Greek phonology. So for example, I'd pronounce Chicago roughly as see-KAH-gho (i.e., how you'd pronounce Σικάγο), George Bush as Tzortz Bous, etc., rather than switching to an American phonology for one word or phrase.
Yes, that tends to happen automatically if you speak fast.
I'm fastidious on this question because I hear most foreign names utterly mispronounced by English speakers, so I try to do my small part in rectifying it.
I guess I don't really consider adapting a word or name to the sound system of the target language to be "mispronunciation". When speaking Greek, I use Greek phonemes, and when speaking English, I use English phonemes, which seems to be how most native speakers do things in their own language. I mean, since I speak both natively I could mix the phonemes, pronouncing Greek names in English as if I were speaking Greek and vice-versa, but it would seem weird and affected, like I was showing off that I knew multiple languages.
If anything it's something of a marker of non-native speakers; native English speakers who learn Greek as a foreign language will often slip back into English phonemes to "correctly" say the names of people or places from English-speaking countries rather than adapting them to Greek phonemes, whereas Greeks typically don't (not even Greeks who speak fluent English).
There are two levels of mispronunciation. If you pronounce 'Hermite' in English so it rhymes with 'thermite', you have no excuse. It's ignorant and plain wrong. If you pronounce it with a silent 'H' and use the right ending sound and as close approximations to the vowels and intonation as your language will accommodate, that's perfectly fine; I do that too.
It's the difference between ignorance and knowledge, carelessness and respect. That still leaves room for pragmatism and plain speech.
I sure hope, then, that you correctly pronounce the initial 'p' in Greek names starting with a 'pt' and 'ps' consonant cluster, rather than omitting it like an ignorant American! (Do you pronounce the 'p' in Ptolemy, or mispronounce it as if it were written Tolemy?)
For good measure one should pronounce it in words like psychology as well, but I suppose the pronunciation error there has been sufficiently fossilized that it's now an English word with a new pronunciation. Perhaps the Hermitian will suffer the same fate as the Ptolemies and psychologists?
That's where pragmatism comes in! Some words are grandfathered into the language and that's that. For names of people that have yet to be entered into dictionaries, I fight my little fight to have their pronunciations conform more closely to the original.
To prove my dedication to pragmatism, when I first moved to the US many years ago, no-one was able to pronounce my one-syllable first name, to say nothing of my last name. After a week or so I gave up and started introducing myself as 'pair'. When I later lived in Korea, a country whose language is deficient in diphthongs, I introduced myself as 'pae-uh' and wrote my name accordingly in Hangul.
Ah ok, I think I see what you mean--- you're willing to adapt for phonemes that don't exist, but not otherwise. It seems that's easiest to do when going between scripts, because the transliteration step lets you rewrite the word phonetically in the new language, as close as possible. But between languages like English and French that share a script, you have to keep the same spelling, which then will typically imply a different pronunciation in the target language, unless you apply special "remember, this was a loanword" pronunciation rules.
An alternative would be to do transliteration even when going from Latin->Latin languages, taking a French word and respelling it so it reads phonetically in English, but I suspect people would like that even less. I believe French actually does do a little bit of that when borrowing English words, but in that case there's an official language academy to invent the new spellings.
In my mind there is also a difference between fully adapted words like psychology and foreign technical words such as techne, gnosis and episteme the way you might use them in a class on Plato. This second class of words, along with names of people, should ideally have their sounds conform more closely to the originals. Of course, words will often start in the second class and drift into the first class. That's how language evolves.
I'm fully bi-lingual french-english and yes, I can 'think' in both languages, but I wouldn't say my simultaneous multitasking is that great. When focusing on complex problems I tend to tune absolutely everything else out.
I'm Hungarian-English-Romanian(intermediate) speaking(in order of capability). Hungarian is my mother language, Romanian is the government's language and I learned English around the age of 4-5(I don't remember exactly).
I thought multi-tasking is a programmer/freelancer skill. There were times when I undertook 5 projects the same time. I was helped by the fact that not all clients were in the same timezone, though I still had to quickly shift between projects and I had no problem with that, I didn't feel that it was anything special.
About information filtering: I go trough HN's full RSS feed along with other news sources I have in my Google reader.
I think the mind manages to create some sort of independent representation of thoughts, sometimes I can't remember if I have seen a movie in English or Hungarian.
I would think that it has to do with finding the corollaries between words from each language. It would simply be the way a person has, by a side effect of learning two language, trained themselves to think differently than most people.
The ability to receive information about one subject and relate it to another has always set people above the common straight line thinker.
I grew up bilingual and although I sometimes felt 'snappier' than other kids, when I was young (don't you get bored with just one language?) - I today enjoy single-tasking.
Personally I'm fairly fluent in English and Slovenian (to the point of having published short stories in both languages in magazines) and I have to say I don't even differ between the languages anymore. Most of the time I'm not even aware which particular language I'm listening to and it's happened before where I was watching a programme in Slovenian and thought the actors were talking English.
However I can't say this has beneficially affected my ability to multi-task. I certainly seem to try multi-tasking a lot and can't even not do it, but as to whether it's effective or not, I couldn't really say. People around me seem to dislike me doing it (especially when I hold multiple conversations with them at a time), but it's just the way my brain works. I can't not do it.
This makes achieving a state of flow somewhat hard, which sucks terribly.
Firstly, I'm deeply envious of anyone who is genuinely bilingual. I've worked pretty hard, and still only have a smattering of other languages. I've never really had the chance or reason to develop fluency in anything other than my native tongue, so cherish your ability. You probably can't - from the inside - realise quite what advantages it bestows.
And that's my second point. Many of you are saying that you don't think it's significantly affected your ability to multi-task, but you can't know. This is why science demands proper double-blind randomized trials. You don't know what you would be like without your bilingualism, so you don't know how - or if - it's affected you. Maybe without your bilingualism you'd be a lot worse at multi-tasking. Or a lot better. You can't tell.
I have various skills, and I believe that some have helped, and perhaps some have hindered, my programming, but I certainly can't tell.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2244178 where there's a report that bilingualism seems to delay the onset of Alzheimer's.