In secondary school, Tsao's Japanese was better than that of most native speakers and he became accustomed to thinking in the language. He says that when he switched to using Mandarin following the war, his thoughts often got muddled. "I had to think about things in Japanese first," he recalls, "then translate my thoughts into Mandarin, which made writing more difficult."
中學時日文就比日本人還好的曹永和，習慣以日文思考，終戰後改成中文時，「我的腦筋時常變得很混亂，總要先以日文思考後再翻譯成中文，增加行文時的障礙。」