Working with multiple languages

Hello. I’m new to RemNote, and I’m a Brazilian but I use english regularly, for work and for all kinds of stuff. I use portuguese and english about the same amount in my life. I’m wondering if there are other people like me that use RemNote, and how do you manage that. Do I just have to pick one language and try to stick with it? Otherwise It’s going to be annoying to find stuff because it will get divided into two languages right?

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I’d say: stick to one main language for most of the text per Knowledge Base/study subject. But it is easier to mix things up if you are using Aliases. :wink:
For the names of your Concepts, you can set up Aliases (multiple names for the same word/phrase) in both English and Brazilian. That will make looking things up a breeze.

In my own KBs, I write in English.
The exception is Concept names in the KBs I dedicated to study subjects. In those, I add both the English and native language words and then define the Concepts.

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Oh that’s nice. I didn’t know aliases were a thing. I tried it for a bit and it seems to work ok. I guess I’ll use both languages freely then, since really there are some things that make much more sense to write in one language than the other, otherwise it would be strange. There is a bit of extra work involved but that’s the price I pay I guess =) Thank you Gabriela

If anyone else is in the same boat and wanna share a different workflow feel free though!

Although I’m not a bilingual speaker, here’s my take.

I agree with @Gabriela.AD Gabriela! Choose one language as your primary, and where applicable use the alias feature to represent the information in your second. To avoid running into retrievability madness (“which language did I write this in?”), keep all Rem titles, concepts and tags in one language and use the second through aliasing and sensibly within body text.

I can see exceptions. If a concept is more intuitive for you in your second language (or maybe it originated there), write it using this language. The point would be to always have your Rems searchable in one language, so you’d want a primarily language alias to facilitate later search queries. Avoid invariably running into guessing games in the future by being consistent. You’ll need to trust your system.

Furthermore, maybe you’re reading an article written in your secondary language. It could be justified to render a source note with the title in this language. After all, the author or institution may be of your second language’s descent, so you’d have a retrieval cue. Nevertheless even here I’d find a way to systematise: tagging the source note with #POR, for example, to find all sources originally written in Portuguese.

Hope these untested thoughts assist in some way!

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