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Thinking in a foreign language... | ||
Tags: Thinking | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6538 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 25 of 36 19 January 2010 at 12:16am | IP Logged | |||||
I have no idea about what you are talking about. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| bramsterdam Bilingual Hexaglot Senior Member NetherlandsRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5427 days ago 106 posts - 113 votes Speaks: Dutch, French*, English*, German, Spanish, Russian | Message 26 of 36 19 January 2010 at 3:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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I find depending who I am around and what I am listening to, will be the language I´m "thinking" in. But for everyday regular thoughts usually French. If I am hanging out with some of my Mexican friends for example, we´re all speaking Spanish and therefore I´ll be listening to Spanish and my thoughts will translate Spanish/into Spanish. Unless sometimes when I have to think of a word I´ll search for it in French then figure out, "oh verdad, la palabra es.. "
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| rostocpj Pentaglot Newbie United States Joined 5491 days ago 21 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, French, Toki Pona Studies: Esperanto, Indonesian, Shanghainese, Cantonese | Message 27 of 36 19 January 2010 at 4:38am | IP Logged | |||||
See that's just it. If what you are being asked to produce lays within those 5 words, in order to begin truly learning to function in the language, you should "think" in the language. By making direct associations in your mind eye between the mental image of an object and the word in your target language, you begin cutting out the middleman, namely your native language. You don't need a large vocabulary to think in a language. A child thinks in a language without having all the words necessary to express themselves but through this process of trying with what you have and then having someone fill in the blanks (rather than reverting back to native language to do so), you begin to truly function in the language. You can think in foreign language from day one HOWEVER you can't think like a scholar from day one. There's a difference. I'm assuming that the teacher was referring to the idea of trying to go directly from mental picture to foreign word rather than mental picture to native word to foreign word. Edited by rostocpj on 19 January 2010 at 4:42am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5866 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 28 of 36 19 January 2010 at 2:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think Cainntear is right. I feel that my thinking is filled with thoughts, ideas, notions, hopes, concerns, expectations, dreams, etc., none of which are represented by sentences, phrases or words. Apart from 'daydreams', every night I also have dreams that are usually very clear and detailed. I cannot recall any part of those dreams being 'in' any language, but I occasionally recall a sentence or so in L2. But I recall those sentences as objects from the dream, not thoughts from the dream. Same for thinking during the day; words, phrases and sentences seem to be objects within the thinking, not the thinking or thoughts themselves. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6538 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 29 of 36 19 January 2010 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Tell me if I got your ideas correctly. What Cainntear is saying is that thoughts are universal and it doesn't matter
what language you are speaking because universal thoughts are unchanging. It's basically putting metaphysics before epistemology. Some might call this naive realism. You are taking it for granted by thinking that your thoughts are not formulated by the English language itself. Then again, this is an issue that's being debated by academics who spent their entire lives trying to figure it out, so it would be silly for anyone of us to say that we know the answer 100 percent. Edited by Kugel on 19 January 2010 at 5:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 30 of 36 19 January 2010 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Kugel: Please note that this is a language forum, not a philosophy forum. As such, you might need to dumb down
your more philosophically inclined posts so that less educated persons, such as myself, might understand them. At least if you want an honest discussion of the concepts you mention. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 31 of 36 19 January 2010 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
No, what I am saying is that I am not a different person when I speak in another language, and if thought and language were so interdependent, I would need a completely different mode of thought to operate in two different languages, to the point of having multiple personalities, which I don't! If my brain's internals were molded by language, I must therefore have an English brain. It would also make codeswitching very difficult if thoughts were linguistic: In a codeswitched sentence, you start with a thought and express it in two or more languages. If the thought started out in a single language, you would have to translate it to express it in the other language(s). However, codeswitching can be every bit as quick as monolingual speech, so there can't be any translation happening. Edited by Cainntear on 19 January 2010 at 7:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 32 of 36 21 January 2010 at 3:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think in English in this moment because I'm commenting on something in an Anglophone thread in a (mainly) Anglophone forum. If I look out of the window there is a white house - OK I press the 'French' button and think "ça doit être la maison blanche". And now I look down on my desk and see some papers in Danish and others filled with numbers - OK I don't have to think in words because somehow I know that they represent work to do. If I actually start to read the Danish text this normally triggers thinking in Danish, but I can overrule it by pressing a 'translate into German' button, and then my thoughts about the Danish text will be formulated in German.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that I first formulated all this in Danish and then translated it. If I do translate, as in the last example, then I know I'm doing it. That being said, while I'm learning a language I will of course tend to reuse sentence constructions from the languages I already know (not necessarily my native Danish) because that's my safest bet, and if I am searching for a word in a language I may have similar words from other languages popping up in my brain, but it might also be pictures or associations to when I last time saw a word or expression (in any language) that might do the job. It doesn't mean that I first thought of a Danish word and then didn't´know its translation into langage X. I started with a void in the middle of a sentence, and my brain just tried to help me. I do believe that we to some extent tend to think about things that are 'thinkable' in the language we are using at the moment, but also that we can overrule those restrictions, for instance by recalling how to say it in another language or as a picture - and in THAT case we might be accused of 'translating'. But as long as our cogitations take place firmly within the framework defined by our skills in language X we don't have to translate at all. Doing it is just a bad habit. Edited by Iversen on 21 January 2010 at 3:50pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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