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Is translation bad? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5217 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 17 of 28 07 November 2010 at 5:31am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
To me it's obvious: the shortest one, as long as you're aware of not one-to-one correspondences etc. If a single word is not enough to evoke most of the relevant information (like proper usage), then take a few seconds to write a full definition/description. And, in either case, you may foul it up. ...
I don't believe that thought is or can necessarily be depicted as a language and that is why I explicitly said 'transcode it from <however my brain handles it> to <English'. For what we know we could all formulate internally our thoughts in very different ways. The thing is, it is obvious that you somehow handle your ideas, and no matter how you do it, you necessarily need to do some assembly before verbalization. (The opposite would imply that you internally think 'in your language' which is pretty much laughable). On a side note, that babbling, incoherence and self-correction are not all that rare is alone proof enough that this process of transcoding ideas into language isn't either trivial, fully automated or fool-proof :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| S4Real Newbie United States Joined 6260 days ago 25 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 18 of 28 07 November 2010 at 6:13am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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When it comes to speaking and reading, it appears that translating is useful in the beginning but can become a crutch later on which can hinder fluency. I stumbled across an old book that helped me to understand why I'm not fluent yet. That book "The Living Method for Learning How to Think in Spanish" stated, "You cannot speak Spanish while thinking in English. If you tried to do so, your conversation would consists largely of pauses, during which you would endeavor: 1. To find Spanish words and phrases corresponding to your English ones; and 2. To rearrange them so as to make them idiomatic. That would consume entirely too much time. There is only one way to speak Spanish and that is by remembering what Spaniards say under the same or similar circumstances. To remember this, you must first learn it by hearing or reading. That is self-evident. There can be no other way..." When it comes to reading, the book also says that "the usual exercise of translating Spanish into English may teach you what Spanish words and phrases mean in English in a given case, so that you will know them when you see them again; but it will not enable you to think of them when you wish to use them." One must "read as Spaniards do without translating into English. At first translation is of great assistance until the strange ways of expression become somewhat familiar. Then by reading several thousand pages of Spanish, beginning with the easiest and very gradually increasing in difficulty, the useful words and turns of expression impress themselves upon the memory by the frequency of their occurrence. Your aim should be to emancipate yourself from the necessity of putting Spanish into English. The way to do so is to say each sentence over to yourself in Spanish without looking at the book, as soon as you know what is means. It makes no difference how you find out what it means. Say it deliberately enough to associate the ideas with the Spanish words. Say it as if you were communicating the ideas in it to an imaginary listener. If a sentence is too long, skip it or divide it. It may be slow work at first, but you will soon do it unconsciously. When this habit is formed, reading Spanish will be thinking in Spanish..." This idea can apply to any language especially Spanish, French, and German. The key is learning to truly think in the language, then translation will be minimal.
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| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5399 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 19 of 28 07 November 2010 at 7:58am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I think translation gets a bit of a bad rap at times.
With the beginner/intermediate books and first few "real" books you read there will be plenty of your mother tongue rolling around in your head as you read, but as you continue to do more and more your reading speed starts getting faster and faster and your brain naturally starts turning off the "translator" as it simply becomes unnecessary and inefficient after you've seen the words and grammar forms enough times. The same thing happens with listening. At first there's plenty of translating going on as you listen, which makes it impossible to keep up with anything like natural speech, but as you get more comfortable your brain is basically forced on its own to start dispensing with the translations in order make keeping up even possible. As you reach "normal" reading speeds and are listening to native speech at normal speeds any translating in your head will naturally disappear on its own as it eventually becomes an unnecessary step for your brain. If someone walked up and said "Hola, amigo" even people that haven't studied a day of Spanish wouldn't necessarily need to "translate" that when understanding it. They've known the translation at one point in their life, but have since heard it enough times that continual translation has become unnecessary. As you study, learn, and practice your language eventually everthing becomes that automatic on its own. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6002 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 20 of 28 07 November 2010 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
But the author subscribes to the notion that you "think in" a language. The reality is as mrwarper says: you think in thought, language is a mere encoding of thought. We can include every bit of thought, so we make assumptions. A language community usually has shared assumptions, and if we are communicating with a different speech community, even one which shares a language with us, we often have to learn their conventions. So rather than "thinking in Spanish", you have to learn to "think like a Spaniard" (or Mexican or whichever group you're talking to). But this does not mean:
No, you need to know how to say it in Spanish, it is as simple as that.
This is a very naïve view of language. As Chomsky pointed out, there is too much innovation and imagination in language for it to be nothing more than conditioned "stimulus-response" habits. People all the time say things that they have never heard. If you speak to an infant, this is truly self-evident. My favourite example is "me want biss-kit". Many children will never hear a pattern like this anywhere, but almost all English-speaking children will go through a stage of speaking in this way.
This is a reaction to the method of learning to read Latin and Greek, which had been adopted for modern language and was completely unsuited to the task. However, it has very little relevance to modern language learning techniques.
This is good general advice and is incorrect. The problem with most language teachers is that the start by identifying a general problem. Some at this point immediately provide a specific solution, using the existence of the problem as proof of the solution. The author of the book hasn't taken such a great leap. He at least found the the general problem and the general solution, but he still talks about a specific implementation of the solution as though it were synonymous with the solution itself. Not the use of the phrase "the way to do so":
He's skipped one step out in the general solution. From the above, he is promoting the idea that you only learn when the language is used meaningfully and productively, but what he proposes is actually very difficult: forcing yourself to repeat something without simply "parroting". It is very difficult to want to say something that you've just read. Who am I telling? Why do they need to know? And why do I need to say that? I find it bad enough in most cases, but when I'm asked to repeat things like "I'm from America" (I'm not!), it jars very badly. It's particularly dissonant when I'm asked to say a sequence like "I'm from America" "I'm not from America" "I'm American". My brain just rejects it all and I either end up parroting, or I stop the tape/close the book/whatever. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5684 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 21 of 28 07 November 2010 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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(Excuse me if this is sort of off-topic, but...)
I don't think in language. Does this make me weird? My thoughts are like a silent movie, with colorful images but no sound. When I write in any language, including my native language, I feel like I'm "translating" my thoughts into that language. I'd be really interested to know if anyone else here thinks the same way, and if it has affected your method of/success at language-learning in any way. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| S4Real Newbie United States Joined 6260 days ago 25 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 22 of 28 07 November 2010 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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[QUOTE=Cainntear]
He's skipped one step out in the general solution. From the above, he is promoting the idea that you only learn when the language is used meaningfully and productively, but what he proposes is actually very difficult: forcing yourself to repeat something without simply "parroting". Yes, what he proposes is difficult, he never said that fluency would be easy. He said it was a slow process. When a language is used meaningfully and productively, don't we learn it better? I understand some of your ideas. But, we can find flaws with any learning method. Its best to take the good from multiple sources and assimilate it with our individual learning styles. Learning to think in the target language is an important key to fluency and can minimize or eliminate the constant need to translate. This idea is not far-fetched. If you have other keys please share it for assimilation. Edited by S4Real on 07 November 2010 at 10:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6694 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 23 of 28 08 November 2010 at 2:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
We have discussed this before, and we'll probably never agree - it seems that our minds function differently. For me languages AND images AND sounds are the stuff thoughts are made of - and not just something that expresses the 'real' thinking, whatever that is. There is certainly some hidden work going on behind the façade, but the façade is part of the building. Or in other words: the words in my mind are not a translation of my thoughts - they are in themselves part of my thinking process. I like the idea expressed by Splog and others: that the function of using a translation is that a wellknown word or expression in your own language carries a whole lot of associations with it. These will make it easier both to remember and to apply the foreign word, and by having a translation by a confirmed source you avoid the risk pointed out by Cainntear, namely that you make wrong guesses about the meaning because the context can be interpreted in several ways. Then you can always add more meanings and caveats later. In my references to my wordlists I have consistently pointed out that words aren't learned in one go. First you have to nail them, and for that purpose it is not necessary to know all the complications - but what you do remember about any given word should at least be correct. And your chances of getting such a core meaning correctly is greatly enhanced by the use of a bilingual dictionary - but hardly by a simple monolingual dictionary where the meaning is hinted at through some vague and contrived circumlocution. Actually I do have a couple of monolingual dictionaries in languages I know well at home , but I rarely use them to get the meaning of words. The relevant things in such volumes are the indications about etymology, morphology, maybe idiomatic expressions. But the empty babbling of a monolingual dictionary doesn't say enough about the meaning to make it clearer than a translation. If I want to know what kind of bird a "Gimpel" in German is then I'll either use an encyclopedia or a field guide, not a monolingual German dictionary. But a German-English dictionary would thell me that it is a "bullfinch", and if I know that bird ("dompap" in Danish) then I know what it is. Even when the meaning of a foreign word can't simply be equated with the meaning of just one word in my native language then it is much more efficient to get an explanation that uses words I already know well than if I have to guess the distributions of meanings from a few scattered and unrepresentative specimens. Of course there can be cases where there isn't really a simple set of translation possibilities. For instance the prefix "ber-" is much used in Bahasa (I&M) and it definitely has some kind of meaning, but it would be hard to explain this meaning by referring to specific Danish or English words. Then the best thing is to make some kind of collection with translations and thereby get a feeling for the range of uses it has. But this is not the typical case, at least not with words for concrete objects and actions. Finally: is there a danger that you get stuck in a pattern where you first decide what to say and then translate it? If so, then it is just a bad habit, and you just have to tell yourself to thinking and speaking directly in the foreign language, maybe even train this skill specifically. But even that doesn't prevent you from using bilingual dictionaries. Edited by Iversen on 08 November 2010 at 8:26pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 5181 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 24 of 28 08 November 2010 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Just to weigh in on the language v thought debate, I read in the Guardian this weekend the sad story of Tom Lubbock, an Art Critic at the Independent, who is dying of a brain tumour which is slowly robbing him of his language.
In the article he says:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/07/tom-lubbock-brai n-tumour-language I know it's only one person, but that is quite compelling evidence that thought = language. Edited by Andrew C on 08 November 2010 at 3:18pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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