Reaching for words as a multi-linguist
You know that feeling when you're in the middle of writing a message, email, or a long piece text and that word is right at the tip of your tongue and you just can't seem to get it off?
You attempt to feel around at the edges, that meaning you're reaching for, you try describing it with a phrase, and hope to find that one word to precisely articulate what you mean -- a word that you are sure as hell it exists and you have seen or used it before.
Fortunately, if you speak multiple languages I like do, sometimes you can think of a that word in another language. You relish in that spark of hope and head over to your translation service of choice to find the translation of that word you thought of. Usually, it comes up exactly as you wished for -- that word, that word, it's so easy, it's right there, how could you not have thought of it? Other times, it comes out sub-par, and clinging on to that last shred of hope you search up the synonyms of the translation. You look through the list... ah-ha, found it!
Knowing another language does seem to help when reaching for words... Or does it?
I've found through experience from interacting with many multi-linguists around me that it can be easy to be overly reliant on the alternative choice of language when expressing ourselves. Making it too effortless to think of a word can actually be a bad thing.
It all depends on the literacy level of the languages you know, and what your audience knows. Colloquial conversations with some of my friends become a conglomerate mess of mixed slangs and vocabulary from multiple languages stringed together with occasionally broken grammar; for those of us who aren't perfectly fluent in any, we end up not getting better in all of them. When the venn diagram of the languages you know and ones the other person know has only one language in the intersection, some of us may even end up being seen as unable to articulate precisely.
We all have a language we're most proficient in despite our differences. It may be slightly easier to find certain words when you're given access to a translator and maybe even a thesaurus while we're at it. But in daily conversations and for self-improvement? Not so much unless you're a language enthusiast, in my experience.
YMMV.