شش راه برای متوقف کردن ترجمه ی ذهنی

6 ways to STOP translating in your head & THINK in another language!

Hello everyone and welcome back to English With Lucy.

I probably look a little bit different today and that is because I think I live in the hottest flat in England, or at least in Cambridge.

Oh my God. Right, so it’s around 27, 28 degrees outside which for England is really, really hot but inside my flat, it’s like a damn rainforest. It’s humid, muggy, that’s a really good word, muggy is when it’s like heavy, hot, sticky air, humidity and I have a whole wall of windows, which is great, because it lets in loads of light but it also contributes to a greenhouse effect in my flat and so I’m absolutely boiling.

So I couldn’t bring myself to do my hair ‘cause it would just, I’d put it in and then it would fall out again and also no turtlenecks today. We’ve got my Coca Cola tee shirt instead which not sponsored, wish it was sponsored, imagine having Coca Cola sponsor you, awesome.

So today, it’s a really, really, really important video.

Today, I’m going to give you some advice on how to stop translating into your native language because a lot of people have this problem.

I’ve asked lots of English learners and learners of other languages and they say, “I would be able to speak so much more fluently “if I could stop translating.”

Now, most of you probably already know this. If you’re new to this channel, then I speak fluent Spanish and I’m actively learning Italian and I remember at the beginning of my Spanish learning journey I really found it hard not to translate.

And translating between English and Spanish can be really, really difficult and annoying

because the word order is so different.

I’m now learning Italian actively and I’m managing to do so without translating into Spanish or English.

So speaking from my own experience as a language learner and speaking from my experience as an English language teacher I’m going to give you some advice and hopefully help you get over this massive, massive hurdle that’s preventing you from improving.

Okay, so I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time and I have actually made some notes on my phone just because I want to get in the right order for you.

So bear with me. So, how to avoid translating into a native language. Well, the first tip I can give you and this will not apply to everyone is don’t start in the first place.

If you’re at like a beginner level of English, some translation is inevitable, you’re going to do it. The way we learn in school is amarillo, yellow, naranja, orange. We learn through translation.

However, think back to when you were a baby. How did you acquire your first ever language, your mother tongue?

You learnt through observing, seeing, watching, hearing, smelling, tasting, watching actions. You didn’t learn through translation because you had nothing to base your translation on because you had no mother tongue. So babies are capable of learning a language without any other language as reference, yet we find it incredibly difficult. So what you need to think is simplification. Babies start small and then over years and years and years, they build their vocabulary.

And you need to apply this to yourself as well. It’s much more effective to learn vocabulary by observing and taking things in than it is to just look at something in the dictionary. And that brings me onto my next point. Oh my God, I’m so hot. And that brings me onto my next point which is grab your bilingual dictionary and throw it out of the window. Don’t do that, okay, it might land on somebody’s head.

Just place it to one side very carefully and then pick up your monolingual dictionary, is that the word for it? And then pick up the dictionary in the language that you are learning, in many of your cases, it will be English and start letting the language define itself. So with words like nouns and verbs it can be a little difficult to understand but that’s where you need to learn through observation.

When you’re looking at adjectives, adverbs and other things like that, try to understand the definition in that same language first because what you’re going to be doing is training yourself to think in the language that you’re learning which brings me on to my third point. Oh my God, what a beautifully well planned out video this is.

So my next two points are about thinking and speaking to yourself in that language. Now, I actually recommend that you start by speaking out loud to yourself in the other language.

I think I mentioned that in a video about conversation, improving your conversation and communication. If you’re interested in that then you can watch that video just up there. However, speaking to yourself in that other language is a really, really key factor in learning to think in the language.

So for example with Spanish, I’ll be driving and I’ll describe the movements that I’m going to be making with the car. I’ll be like (speaking in foreign language). Anyway, that is what I do or I’ll be puttering around my kitchen cooking and talking to myself about what I’m doing. And you will start to notice your own errors, especially when you hear yourself speaking out loud.

Once you’re comfortable speaking out loud to yourself in private in that additional language, move on to starting to think. Now, I think speaking should come before thinking but that’s just my opinion. Everybody learns in different ways. I personally think it’s easier to spot errors and get comfortable when you’re speaking out loud. Now the speaking out loud, you should do in private but the thinking, I want you to do it everywhere, on the bus, seeing what goes past.

It can relate to the video I made on how to learn and remember vocabulary which you can watch up here. It’s a useful method where you observe everything around you and you check to see if you know it in your chosen language. The full explanation is in the video and some people have found that really, really useful. I know I found it useful. See if you can apply using a monolingual dictionary to that video.

I think I recommend using a bilingual one. See if you can do it with an English dictionary. Yeah, so by thinking in English and I’m talking about describing people, if you see someone walking, think to yourself, that man is walking, he is walking down the street or just going through your motions. I am getting off the bus.

I am going to go to the shops. In your head, you’re just starting to immerse yourself in the language.

Ah, that beautiful word, immerse, to immerse yourself, brings me on to point number five

which is immersion. And that’s actually one of my favourite words. I know I have a lot of favourite words but immersion, immersion, mmm, that’s nice, that’s a nice word.

So immersion is something that you should be doing throughout your learning experience. And it’s something you can do whilst multitasking which is one of my favourite things. So, when I’m doing something that doesn’t require 100% concentration like cooking or cleaning,I always have something on in the background.

Cleaning, cooking, washing the car, gardening, whatever, any task that allows you to listen to something else at the same time as doing something else, have something on in that language in the background. I know I’m saying it as if it’s revolutionary but really, don’t forget to do it. I know you can waste so much time and miss out on so much learning. By having it on in the background and not even listening, you will be getting used to pronunciation and accents.

And by listening and concentrating on what they’re saying, you will be familiarising yourself with certain grammar lexi, different vocabulary, but also, you will notice where you are lacking. So, if you listen to a radio programme about, I always say photography, what can I say?

So if you listen to a radio programme about politics, for example. My last point is make it daily. Focus on frequency and consistency. I always say to my students that 20 minutes a day of high quality, not even studying, just language acquisition, language acquisition, I sometimes surprise myself with the words that come out of my mouth, 20 minutes a day of high quality English time, there we are, that sounds more like something Lucy would say, is much, much, much more valuable than 140 minutes all in one day.

So make the general immersion and the thinking and the speaking to yourself something that you do throughout your day.

Make it part of your routine. Make it become automatic to you. I sometimes now go for an

hour thinking in Spanish, you know, thinking out loud in my head in Spanish and then I realise and I go, “God, I’ve just been speaking in Spanish the whole time.” And it’s because I do it so often it becomes automatic. Then, the little tweaks and the little kind of self help part that you’re doing at the end which is searching definitions for words, working on the grammar that you’ve identified that you’re lacking in or attempting to expand your vocabulary, that should be short and it should be daily. Right guys, as always, I want to know your opinions.

You guys are a bunch of extremely intelligent minds and I love hearing your recommendations and I apply them to my daily life as well. So I’d love to know something that helps you stop translating into your native language. I’m sure you’ve got lots to share. In my other video where I asked you how many languages you speak, some of you speak like seven languages which is unbelievable, really awesome, really impressive, honoured to have a group of students like you guys. But yeah, so please share your recommendations and your experience in the comments below and also, constructive criticism is completely welcome.

So if you don’t agree with something I say, say it, just say it in a nice way because I like everyone to be respectful here. But I’m not the goddess of English. What I say doesn’t go. But I really do hope that I help you. That’s it for the video today.