Common language
A four-year-old can speak three languages. It’s mind-blowing to witness. Bilingual kids conceptualize differently. For me (who became multilingual as an adult), “cat” maps directly to the animal. For bilinguals, two words meaning “cat” pass through an intermediate layer to reach the latent representation.
It’s especially interesting watching my kiddo do math, also multilingual. But depending on which language I use, the answer takes longer. Sometimes he gets stuck entirely.
It turns out math in Mandarin is easier.
10 + 5 = 15 — phonetically identical. “Five” to “fifteen”? Irregular1. In Mandarin, 20 is phonetically “two-ten”; 12 is “ten-two.”
Language shapes how we learn.
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When you talk to engineers, it helps to know what rollback, on-call, tech debt, coverage, and parallelism mean.
With VCs, you need to know why dilution, burn rate, TAM, learning velocity, funnel, distribution, and talent density matter.
When you manage a team, you may need to introduce vocabulary that helps people make sense of certain phenomena: locus of control, impostor syndrome, Dunning-Kruger effect, hero mode, cognitive load, psychological safety.
Naming something helps normalize it.
Shared vocabulary helps us communicate, but also helps us see.
Ninety in French is even worse.