Stop Prompting in English If It's Not Your Language

I worked for American companies for the last 10 years. And for all that time, whenever I opened an LLM, I did the same thing without even questioning it: I typed in English.

English is better, right? They train the data in English, blah, and so on and so forth. That was the story I told myself.

But here’s the problem. I am Italian, and this is hard for me.

Sometimes your thinking, your mental model, your flow — it’s in Italian. Then you translate it into English, and that translation is another layer on top of your thought. And that layer is 100% not good.

So for this reason, I started to just discuss in Italian.

Let’s imagine you have your best colleague ever, and you discuss with them in Italian. It works. That’s basically what I do now with the LLM — I treat it like that colleague, and I talk to it the way I’d actually think.

I also know colleagues who discuss in Portuguese, colleagues who discuss in Polish, and it’s the same story: once again, it works well.

Now, I don’t know if this holds for all languages. But at least, I’d guess, for all the European languages — and I’m quite sure it works with Spanish too. It works very well.

So if you’ve been forcing yourself into English because you assumed that was the “correct” way to prompt — stop. Try it in your own language first.