So, You Think in English?
How Language Shapes the Way We See the World
You think green is green.
It’s one of the first truths you were handed. The kind of word you could point to as a toddler and win applause for. Grass is green. Honey is yellow. The sky is blue. Those labels stick. We carry them into adulthood, mistaking words for reality. Then one day you find out honey can be green.
Back in 2013, Taiwanese researcher Muyueh Lee created a beautiful project comparing how English and Chinese divide the color spectrum. It was designed as an exploration in data visualization. But what stayed with me wasn’t just the project itself — it was the way it exposed the limits of my own categories. You open it expecting minor quirks, maybe an unfamiliar shade here or there. Instead, the ground shifts.
In English, the chart looks predictable. But on the Chinese side, a single word leaps out — qīng (青). Depending on context, qīng might mean green, or blue, or in older usage even black. It slides between categories that English treats as separate, and just like that, ‘green honey’ stops sounding absurd.
That’s the moment you realize something you were never taught: language doesn’t just describe reality. It edits it. It decides which differences matter, which categories exist, and what even counts as noticeable.
You close the browser. Grass is still green, honey still yellow, but the confidence you once had in those labels is gone. Maybe you don’t see the world as it really is. Maybe you only see it through the words you’ve been handed.
I should have known earlier. Years before I ever saw that visualization, China had already shown me.
I was standing on a side street, watching a man build a broom during my lunch. Not buying one at a shop, but building it — tying together stalks of bamboo, knotting twine, shaking out the bristles. Nothing ceremonial. Just daily work.
I’d been studying Chinese. I was clumsy with tones and clunky with grammar, but I thought I was making progress. And then, staring at him, it hit me: he wasn’t thinking this in English. He wasn’t silently narrating the way I was. His thoughts weren’t passing through my structure at all.
It sounds obvious now, perhaps. But in that moment, it stopped me cold. The realization wasn’t intellectual — it was like stepping off that curb and getting hit by a taxi.
That was the first time I understood: thought itself doesn’t translate.
A few years later, when I saw Green Honey, that street corner came rushing back. The broom wasn’t just a broom. The color spectrum wasn’t just colors. Both were reminders that words don’t just let you speak — they teach you how to notice. They make you who you are before you even know it.
Take food.
In English, “spicy” is just spicy. One word, one bucket. Everything from jalapeños to wasabi to chili flakes. You can add qualifiers (“mildly,” “very”), but it’s still one blunt category.
In Sichuan, “spicy” divides into two sensations you can’t ignore once you taste them. Málà (麻辣): má for the numbing, buzzing electricity of Sichuan peppercorn; là for the straight heat of chili. Together, they create a tingle you don’t even register properly in English. Without the word, you don’t quite taste it. With it, your tongue learns to separate what used to be one. A vocabulary gap isn’t just a missing label. It’s a missing experience.
Or take color.
In English, “blue” is blue. However, in Russian, you’re forced to choose between goluboy (light blue) and siniy (dark blue). They’re treated as two separate basic colors, like English treats red and orange. In Namibia, the Himba people have dozens of terms for green but no single word for blue. They’ll instantly notice distinctions in foliage you and I can’t.
Same sky. Same spectrum. But depending on the words, you’re not even seeing the same world.
And then there are words you can’t drag into English at all.
Like yuánfèn (缘分). A Chinese concept that means two people are bound together by fate, that an invisible thread has aligned their meeting. We flatten it into “luck” or “coincidence,” but that misses the point. Luck is a shrug. Yuánfèn is destiny, the universe conspiring.
The more I learned, the more obvious it became: English hadn’t prepared me for any of this. My categories had always felt like reality itself, like the only map of the world that mattered. But they weren’t. They were just one way of cutting it up.
When we travel, we like to tell ourselves we’re neutral. We carry cameras and notebooks, our eyes wide open, convinced we’re capturing places as they are.
But that’s a myth.
We don’t arrive blank. We arrive already coded. Our language has been shaping our attention since before we could speak in full sentences. It told us what to call colors, how to describe food, what counts as coincidence, and what counts as fate. It gave us ready-made categories and quietly convinced us they were reality.
So when we land somewhere new, we’re not observing it cleanly. We’re filtering it through words we never chose.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: most travelers never notice. They believe they’re seeing the “real” city, the “authentic” culture, the “unfiltered” truth—without realizing that every thought they have about it is already bent by their own vocabulary.
The divide isn’t between people who speak a language and people who don’t. The divide is between those who realize they’re carrying a filter and those who don’t.
The divide isn’t between people who speak a language and people who don’t. The divide is between those who realize they’re carrying a filter and those who don’t.
And that’s where travel actually matters.
Not in collecting photos, not in racing through checklists, not in proving you “did” a country. The value of travel is in brushing up against other ways of thinking. It’s in seeing your categories wobble and realizing you weren’t neutral after all.
That’s the lesson I keep circling back to. I never became ‘fluent’ in Chinese. I still stumble through conversations, still forget words, still retreat into English far too often. But fluency isn’t the point. The point is knowing that my own language was never the full story.
That knowledge changes how you move through the world. Once you see that language isn’t just communication—that it’s the structure of what you notice—you can’t go back to believing reality is neutral.
Travel isn’t just movement through space. It’s movement through perspective. The things you thought were solid—like color, taste, even fate—turn out to be solid only inside your own vocabulary. Step outside it, and the world looks different.
You thought green was green. It isn’t. Honey can be green. And once you know that, you’ll never see language—or travel—the same way again. ❎
Acknowledgment: My thanks to Muyueh Lee, whose original visualization first crossed my Google Reader feed over a decade ago and shifted how I thought about language and my life abroad in China. I’m also grateful for his generosity in sharing the Internet Archive link that allowed me to revisit it while writing and share it here.
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When I first came to Germany, I couldn't speak any German at all. I learnt it by immersing myself in it, like music. After a while you hear notes you recognise, then melodies. Eventually you begin to understand a new perspective that is another language and to fall in love with it. Then you start dreaming in that language. Now, forty years later I think bilingually.
I have been learning Greek for some time now. It is hard because I am not with Greeks enough of the time to immerse myself. That will change in the coming years, now I am retired and can spend more time there. Greek gives us clues to how English was formed, as well as offering a more relaxed view of life, much older and wiser.
Thank you for writing this piece, it is so important for a fuller comprehension of humans and language.
This is wonderful!
As Lisa notes, there are so many thoughts in French that don't exist in English. My Nana used to rue that I didn't learn Italian dialect - apparently I missed out on a lot!
Living in New York I learned that the Yiddish schlepp isn't just walking - but it's the energy required to make it happen. Or Schmatta -- that raggedy thing that is cozy comfy -- but you wouldn't dare wear it in public.