|
 |
Thinking in foreign language | ||
Tags: Thinking | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| zekecoma Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5336 days ago 561 posts - 655 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 1 of 9 20 March 2011 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
I've been told by my German friends and even language learners, that I still think in English, which is also another reason why I have trouble with listening comprehension. I don't know if the latter is true, but I am starting to wonder if it is true. How does one go about training their human brains to think in another language rather than just their native language portion?
I think also, by not thinking in the other language, it is what hinters me from be able to speak it even if it is just to myself. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 9 20 March 2011 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
"Thinking in a language" is a myth. Our brains do not "think" in any language -- they think in thought. We use language as a means of encoding and expressing our thoughts, and as a consequence, we learn how to use language as a way of consciously ordering our thoughts.
When people tell you to "stop thinking in English", they'll normally couple this with the claim that your problem is that you're translating everything, but this isn't always true, and it really winds me up when people insist on this as an invariant truth. If I say something in (eg) Gaelic in the same way I would say it in English, it is because I have not learnt to say it in Gaelic. It is as simple as that. Whether I am "translating" from English or simply using the same instinctual pattern is irrelevant -- I say it wrong because I do not know how to say it correctly. How do we learn new stuff? Consciously, mostly. You have to start thinking more about your English, not less. Start looking at how two different concepts use the same words in English, and start to conceptualise the concept as different from the language. The obvious example is the difference between knowing a fact and knowing a person. If you avoid thinking about this in a language you know, how are you going to fully appreciate the difference in a language you don't? So find one or two of your common "thinking in English" mistakes. Then think about the English. Think about why the English is "wrong" and deconstruct back to the concept. Then think about what the German/French/Whateverese does differently and think about how that expresses something better. It will be worse in some respects -- notice this and accept this -- but it will be better in others. Sometimes you'll have to settle for "it's just like that", but there's usually a logic behind everything in language. It's just that the logic is slightly different in each language. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 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 4 of 9 20 March 2011 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Our brains think in thoughts, and some of those thoughts are formulated as sentences in a language. It's as simple as that. I have never really understood why you have this aversion against recognizing this part of our thinking, especially given that the way we formulated those thoughts in languages we know well is partly rooted in automatisms that for the most part are subconscious. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5422 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 5 of 9 20 March 2011 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Without going into deep debate about how the neurological processes of thought, I think the problem that the OP is talking about here is generally speaking the phenomenon that as learners or foreigners we do not speak idiomatically. Firstly, this means that we tend to translate literally from our native tongue. Secondly, we have mastered not the idioms of the target language; so we tend to speak in a somewhat clumsy fashion. This is why people say that we are not "thinking" in the language.
How do your solve this problem? That's a very good question, and many people here have ideas about this. I personally believe that one effective strategy is to build on a foundation of set phrases that can be transformed as needed, but I won't go into the details now. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5685 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 6 of 9 20 March 2011 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think it makes sense to claim that "we" think a particular way. In my experience, everyone thinks differently, and everyone's brain works slightly differently. I've posted before in this forum about how there's no language involved in my thought. My thoughts are like a colorful silent film, with events and scenes that I can "watch" like I'm watching a movie, but no spoken or written language at all. Other people with whom I've discussed this, though, tell me that they often think in words and sentences, just like they were "talking in their brains." I can't imagine this, but apparently it happens! For me, the only way to make language in my head is by imagining my mouth speaking each word. This is a rather involved process, so I only do it when I'm writing or reading. For instance, right now as I'm typing, I'm silently mouthing each word to myself. I do the same thing when I'm reading, especially in non-native languages. I think we just need to accept that people are diverse. Brains are diverse. Something which seems impossible to one person may be perfectly normal for someone else, and we can never really understand this on a deep level, because after all, we're trapped inside our own brains and can't get out. :) 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5661 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 9 20 March 2011 at 10:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
When somebody says "guten tag" to you, do you translate it in to English? I expect that the first few times you did, but now I am almost certain it just enters your brain as a greeting without any kind of deliberate analysis going on. You most likely say a greeting back to them in German too, almost as an automatic response. In other words, only at the very beginning stages with a language are you likely to do translation as a way to unravel every single thing you hear and as a way to create things ever single thing you want to say back. Over time, the things that you have come across many time become habitual. Listening and speaking more, over a long time, allows this to happen with more and more of the language. You are unlikely to be doing anything "wrong", then, you most likely just need a lot more time to let things sink deep inside you as they become habitual. By they way, even when you become relatively "fluent" in a language, there will still be occasional things that trip you up, and that you have to "unravel" to understand - it is just a lot less frequent than it used to be. Edited by Splog on 20 March 2011 at 10:14pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5373 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 8 of 9 21 March 2011 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
You have difficulty speaking (and maybe listening) because you lack automaticity. To be able to utter a sentence naturally in another language, you have to have repeated similar sentences often enough that your brain has become familiar with similar sound strings, similar sentence intonation and flow, and similar word grouping patterns. You can either wait for this to happen on its own over a long period of time -- stress "long" -- or you can make it happen consciously. I really liked sallard's comment that "one effective strategy is to build on a foundation of set phrases that can be transformed as needed". In practical terms, take a complete sentence in German and learn it by heart until it flows naturally from beginning to end. You don't have to say it fast, but you should have no pauses or hesitations, and you should try to mimick the intonation throughout the sentence, as if it were a journey that flowed from beginning to end. Repeat the sentence over and over either in the right context or thinking about the context. Once you've done that, modify it progressively by switching nouns, then adjectives, then verbs, then tense, person, etc. always thinking about real life situations where you would use it. By doing this, you are effectively creating habits based on your real-life needs. You are acquiring correct models that you can adapt to your needs at will. Do this as often as you can, and jump at every opportunity to use these newly-acquired sentences in real life. You should see a change fairly soon. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
