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Translating from L2 to L1 in your head? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| fortheo Senior Member United States Joined 4971 days ago 187 posts - 222 votes  Studies: French | Message 1 of 15 08 October 2011 at 7:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Do any of you do this as you are learning a language? For instance I will hear the word 今日 and translate in my head to English that it means today. This is a hindrance cause i don't want to be thinking in English at all as i am listening or speaking japanese, i just want to know.
For instance, when i hear the word りんご I don't translate in my head to apple, i just picture an actual apple, as if that word is imprinted with the image in my head. i realize this post may have been hard to follow, but does anyone else have this problem? and if so how did you remedy it? I don't want to be translating in my head every time i try to converse in my second language. Edited by fortheo on 08 October 2011 at 8:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5126 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 2 of 15 08 October 2011 at 8:33am | IP Logged | ||
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This should become less and less, the more familiar you become with a word. When someone says 今日 (actually 今天) to me in Chinese, no translation happens because I have heard/said that word hundreds of times. It links immediately with my internal concept of "today". It's part of the process that you are still explicitly translating, but that will fade away as your mind continues to rearrange and optimize itself to make room for Japanese. Edited by tibbles on 09 October 2011 at 8:14am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4844 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 3 of 15 08 October 2011 at 1:22pm | IP Logged | ||
A lot of approaches are built on avoiding this happening. That is why, for example, Rosetta Stone doesn't use any translation. However, I think tibbles is right. Translating in your head is quite normal when learning another language, but the more exposure you get to the language, the less you'll translate. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5701 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 15 08 October 2011 at 1:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Tibbles is right, of course, but I'd like to add - this still happens to me even in English when learning new words. More than that, I actively link the new word to its German counterpart whenever I have the chance, because I want to be able to translate from and to English as well as speak the language.
But after a couple of times translating - and quizzing myself ('how do you say xxx again? what was that word I learnt today when reading that story, and what did it mean?') the link between the word in one language and another should become weaker than the link between the word and other words in the same language. With that I mean a lot of different words - ones that are similar in meaning or grammatical function like 'apple - pear' and 'today - tomorrow', more or less set phrases '今日はいいお天気ですね？' and words that make sense to be used with that one word, both adjectives and verbs. (For example red, green, yellow, juicy, tasty, worm-infested as adjectives for apple, and eat, slice, peel, harvest, throw as verbs - those make sense to me, at least.) When I find myself translating a word even after that initial period, it's a good indicator that I didn't completely understand it or that I haven't yet encountered enough examples to allow for those 'meaningful links' to form. (Of course, I'll learn words faster when I can imagine them as a picture or sound than words that have a very abstract and maybe vague meaning.) At such times it helps to take my sample sentences and analyze them: Would the sentence work without that word? What does adding or removing it change in the meaning? Could I use the sentence pattern and replace the word to make a new sentence? Could I do the same with other parts of the sentence? If I still felt unsure about the meaning I'd probably try to find more sample sentences and do the same again. Afterwards I'll take the sentences or rather sentence patterns I really like and memorize them, if that hasn't already happened. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dongsen Newbie Taiwan Joined 4744 days ago 30 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English | Message 5 of 15 10 October 2011 at 4:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sometimes I will hear a chinese sentence and I have to translate most of the words into English before I can
understand it. Sometimes someone will say something that I easily understand, and a second later I am thinking to myself, Did they just say that in English or in chinese? The other posters are correct, after a while you stop translating and just hear the meaning. Edited by dongsen on 10 October 2011 at 4:11pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6207 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 6 of 15 10 October 2011 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I do it less and less the better I become at a particular language. When you arrive at that elusive state of thinking in the foreign language, you don't have to translate it in your mind into your L1.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5316 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 7 of 15 10 October 2011 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wonder if this might not have something to do with the way you learn words when you first encounter
them. You seem to be able to find a mental image for things that can easily be physically represented, such as an apple, but this is harder to do for more abstract words like today. Have you considered linking some of the more abstract words to feelings, emotions or even physical movements instead? For the word bitter, make a bitter face. For wind, make the face you'd make if the wind were blowing in your face. It might help you to move away from English words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 8 of 15 11 October 2011 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||
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It's natural, and I wouldn't worry about it.
But I'd like to warn against something I did for a short period of time as an inexperienced learner. I tried to completely understand everything that was going on, and would forcibly translate every word, even if I knew it without translation. I would stop completely on an unknown word, and waste time wondering if I'd already learned it or if it was new. Meanwhile, I missed out on other stuff that was going on when I wondered. This bad learning technique was short lived, because it was difficult, and dropping it made things more comprehensible. I mention it here as an example of when translation is bad. However, this type of thing has given translation a bum rap, and has been a catalyst for lots of "no translation" language theory and products. I recommend avoiding "no translation" language products and ignoring "no translation" theories, unless they are targeting rare cases like i mentioned above. Showing someone a picture of an apple instead of translating the word doesn't make it a better method in the long run. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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