Far from it! He meant to type groevries, and they are indeed tasty. You think stroopwaffeln are the cat’s pajamas? Get a packet of groevries and you’ll never look back. 
I find I can easily start thinking in another language, especially one I’ve been speaking for a long time. I don’t remember which language I used for thought when I was in Russia, but I definitely had dreams in two or three languages while I was there - never did before, and haven’t since, with one or two rare exceptions.
John Mahoney (Martin Crane on Frasier) was originally from England, but he’s completely lost his English accent. (I think he consciously worked at an American accent, though, so I don’t think it counts.)
To add to the OP, I have only spoken French for three years. Sometimes I find myself thinking in French, especially when I go shopping.
I am french by birth and educated in english. I find that I think in the language that i am talking or reading in.
One time when I was reading an sf novel I hit a word I did not understand. It took me a sec or 2 to realize that the word was in french and that I was trying to pronounce it in english like the rest of the book. I had to mentely switch gears to understand it.
Also there are some things that I remember in french better than in english. Whenever anyone ask for my social insurance number I must say it to myself in french and then translate to english. This is due, I believe, to the fact that I had to use this number as an ID number while I was a french air force cadet in Quebec.
Nothing makes a number stick in your head more than having to stand at attention yelling it at someone whose nose is almost touching yours.
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I’m bilingual and know two other languages with various degrees of competency.
When I am thinking thoughts like moving furniture from one spot to another, or planning a route to get somewhere without running into traffic, or designing something, I think in pictures or non-language thoughts.
However, when I am about to approach, say a Spanish person, to ask something, I compose my speech in my head in that language. This would almost be like when you are about to hammer a nail in a wall, you instinctively reach out for a hammer in the toolbox.
One interesting thing that has not been mentioned is that certain thoughts or concepts are only available in one language. I can’t remember any specific examples offhand, but for example, something like sarcasm or irony may not have a direct translation in some other languages.
The handful of responses featuring Swedish speakers making fun of Danish reminds me of the scene (repeated several times) in Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom in which the visiting Swedish doctor stands on the windy point, looks up at the sky, and howls, “Dansk scum!” 
Yes, my mother.
Her mother was from a small farming community in Quebec and her father was from Toronto and was not around for the first year or maybe two of her life and did not speak french anyway. Her first language is the french, she learned english about the time she started school. Then when she was 12 she came to Texas. Culture shock or whatever she lost the ability to speak french and the ability to understand everything but the simplest phrases.
My grandmother until she died still tended to think in french if she was giving instructios or very angry. I recall as a small child her speaking to me in french and my replying in english. While I knew what words to reply with I refused to reply in french because my attempts were so often greeted with gails of laughter at my southern accent. “She looks like her grandmother, but she sounds like a Texan!”
My wife is from mainland China, and Mandarin is her native language. I asked her this question once, and she told me that she thinks in English. As far as numbers, I know she still counts and does math in Chinese. She is also starting to lose Chinese, since she tells me there are times she will be talking to her parents on the phone (they still live in China and don’t speak a word of English) and she can’t remember the Chinese word she wants to say.
Howdy,
I am bi-lingual. I speak English as my native tongue and Tetun (East Timor) as my second language.
I speak English most of the time, especially while at work. And I speak Tetun with my East Timorese wife and our family.
The wierd thing is that I find myself thinking in Tetun more often thanwith English, even though I have spoken Tetun for less than two years, but have spoken English for thirty.
Further, I would think that in order to be truly fluent in any given second language, you would need to be able to think in that language. Otherwise, you would only be fumbling and stumbling around and making a fool of yourself. After all, nobody appreciates a “stranger” slaughtering their native tongue.
This is turning out to be more of a personal-anecdote thread than a fact-based thread, so I’ll move it to IMHO.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
My father, a Sicilian immigrant to the US, says that he thinks in Italian. He also counts in Italian. This isn’t surprising, since he learned to speak English at 19 or 20. Here’s the weird part: I speak only English and I know very little Italian, but I when I blurt out a curse or an exclamation, it’s instinctively in Italian. I don’t make a conscious effort to say the words in Italian, I instinctively use certain phrases, even in my thoughts and dreams.
My native language is English; I didn’t encounter Norwegian until early adulthood. Now I live with both languages on a daily basis. As others have said, I think in the language I’m speaking, or would be speaking in that situation. Yesterday I took totnak with me to a fabric store. I spoke to him in English, and thought in English when I was looking at the fabrics by myself - because I sew “in English” (most of my patterns are American, etc.). But as soon as I started talking to the clerk, I switched over to thinking in Norwegian. I had a list of quantities I needed of each fabric, written in English, but as I stood there adding things together in my head (“Let’s see, I want this corduroy for flodjunior’s pants and totnak’s jacket…”), I did the mental arithmetic in Norwegian.
The little flodnaks are growing up with two languages. As far as I can tell, flodjunior thinks in both languages just as I do. When he plays by himself, he usually speaks Norwegian, but when we’re in the States I hear him talking to himself in English. I know he does arithmetic in both languages because he’s asked me for help with words like “plus” and “minus”.
I was speaking and reading and writing exclusively in Chinese for the first four years of my life. When I moved to the United States, I picked up English – and I can definitely recall one evening in the mid '70s when I was consciously aware that my thoughts were now in English, instead of Chinese. Weird…
Nowadays I think almost exclusively in English, and the only time I “backslide” is if I’m recalling the multiplication tables (which my parents drilled into me in Chinese). Make of this as you wish.
(I also forgot how to read and write Chinese, but c’est la vie.)
I grew up learning “Mairkin” (“American”), and thus I do most of my thinking in Mairkin. I know enough French and Esperanto to think in those languages, albeit with some effort, but I have yet to attain that status in Spanish, German or Russian. Sometimes I really wish I had grown up bilingual. Of the five languages I’m learning, I will never be able to speak any of them as well as I speak my native tongue. If I ever have children, I will raise them bilingually (probably in Mairkin and French).
Picking up an accent isn’t all that uncommon. Here in Sweden about a third (completely unscientific number, it just feels that way) of all young Swedes I speak to seem to have a US accent.
One that cracks me up is the Danish ex-Liverpool Footballer Jan Mølby who speaks English with a fantastic Scouse accent.
I should clarify, have a US accent when speaking English. When I speak Swedish to them, which isn’t that often as I am so outstandingly bad at it, they speak Swedish to me in a Swedish accent. Well, if they speak Swedish at all. You really know that your accent is bad when you speak to someone in their language and they reply to you in English. Unless the person you are speaking to is actually English. Swedes speaking Swedish in a US accent, now that would be weird. But I digress …
Count me out. I use RP.
i skipped most of these posts because i’m in a hurry, but i know chinese, taiwanese, english, and catish, but (when i talk humanspeak) i talk in chinglish, mostly english with a smattering of chinese thrown in (which is what just about everyone i know talks in). i also think in chinglish (when i’m not thinking in catish), just because it’s easier than searching for a word in english when you know it in chinese, and vice versa.
and, uh, the accent question? i’m sure i don’t speak catish with an accent, but i’m not so sure about english or chinese (my taiwanese is out of the question - i only know a few words), since either all of us taiwanese-americans here are unaccented, or we all have accents, since no one can tell…
I speak English fluently, Mandarin semi-fluently and French passably, and that’s the hierarchy that I think in. I speak to my parents in Mandarin, and usually switch between English to Mandarin in my thoughts. The other day when I was talking to my parents when my sister (whom I speak in English with) interrupted and I accidentally answered her in Mandarin. She looked at me bug-eyed and went “Did you just speak to me in Chinese?”
Although I usually think in English, I can force myself to think in French or Mandarin, although my vocabulary is limited. When I spent time in France, my preferred method of thinking was in English/French, and when I came back, I would unthinkingly answer my parents in French. I knew quite a few exchange students who reported dreaming in French as well.
I remember reading an article by Anna Wierzbicka where she asserted that there were some Japanese words with no direct meaning in other languages. Having never studied Japanese, I don’t know how true this is, but one example Wierzbicka gave was amae, which is roughly “to presume on the affections of someone close to you”. There were several other examples in the article, but I can’t really think of them offhand.
All these Chinese speakers, wierd. Okay, as I said before, I speak in english or Mandarin, I think in that language. I find though like today, I am speaking in Chinese and I hit specialist vocabulary that I don’t know the Chinese word for. I either describe what I want to say or if I think that person also understands some English, the missing word will pop up in English. In fact, if the person/group I’m talking to understands English pretty well, I will automatically kick out the english word. If I’m with someone like my in-laws, who speak no English, I automatically come out with a description of the word I don’t know in Mandarin.
I also can hang in Shanghaiese, but as soon as I run out of vocabulary, which is real quick, I automatically switch to Mandarin and not to English.
Well, I saw that at some point this thread was moved to IMHO due to anecdotal content, so I guess I don’t have to look for any cites here.
As a student in Georgetown’s School of Languages and Linguistics I took a course under the mythical Prof. Beard in Bilingual Education, and this was one of the major focus points, believe it or not. And rather than go into details that I no longer remember and reference books that I only ever skimmed to begin with, to sum it all up the answer is that it depends on the person. But keep the Nobel committee from calling for the moment, as there’s more! In general (according to what I was taught at least), people who are born speaking more than one language actually develop different locations to store the language data, which means that they actually think in a completely different way when using the two. Non-native speakers of a language, no matter what level they reach, tend to store the language information in with their native tongue (often as counterparts, which accounts for the way many multilingual people tend to only have two languages “handy” at any one time, the mother tongue and foreign one being used the most at the time). However, some linguists argue that this can be a slight advantage to those not bilingual from early childhood, as they have a more mathematic understanding of grammar which allows them to avoid many of the pitfalls, particularly in written language, that many “native” bilingual speakers make. Personally I think this is a bit rubbish.
It would be nice to have cites for some of this, wouldn’t it? Oh well, that is the kind of guy I am, I suppose. Of course, when I was learning all this Al Gore hadn’t even invented the internet, so we weren’t getting our info that way (in truth I was in this class about six years ago–I think even the Quakers had websites by then). Instead I will move to a little anecdotal tidbit to end it:
When I was living in Russia (after having studied the language for nine years) with a Russian family whose full knowledge of the English language consisted of the few German words they remembered from their school days (all them langidges is the same anyways), attending a Russian university and even drinking Russian tap water, I was fully emersed in a foreign language. After a few months I started thinking in Russian, dreaming in Russian–even those pre-Prozac voices in my head were in Russian (I added this for comic effect, you see–I still don’t take Prozac), and I almost never had to translate things from English while speaking. Still, whenever I spoke to other English/American students, when I was on the phone with my family, I rarely had to retranslate back from Russian to English. That is not to say that I didn’t/don’t find it difficult to adequately translate certain colloquial phrases, but that my native tongue was always on the ready to express my basic feelings and emotions, even when I hadn’t spoken English in a while (maybe all those Smiths CDs every night tainted the results a bit).
On a completely separate point (as if that last paragraph had one), I have lived in France for the past two years, and I almost never think or dream in French (though certain nightmares involve it quite a bit). Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I like Russian so much more than French? Of course, I would NEVER claim to be multilingual and include French as one of my languages, though it (and lack of use) has helped to eat away at my Russian level. One more reason to hate the bâtards…