Translation Considered Harmful

I speak two languages fluently. The first one I learned like everyone does - with adults correcting and cajoling me along the way. When I went to school, I started learning English, but after 3 years I has learned next to nothing - alphabet, some grammar rules, some words. But I was unable to put a sentence together in real-time.

I then moved to the US, when I realized that no, I could not understand anything, and what little I could say, the locals found very confusing. I was little, and determined enough that I had managed to become fluent - no thanks to school, where they had no idea what to do with me, and had failed me repeatedly for trying (while other immigrants who did not try, were passed). Four slow claps for the US education system.

So I am very fluent in two languages, but I cannot translate between them. Each exists independently in my brain, and I can switch between them easily enough, but there is very little horizontal connectivity between the two. Sure, I kind of can translate, but it is very slow and clumsy, as I come up with words, then realize there are better ways to say it.

Worthy of note: every attempt to learn another language in school was a failure -- either functionally, or with actual bad grades. I failed high-school French 1 twice, and had a teacher tell me that I have no talent for languages.

Every language course I'd tried was heavily translation based. I think it's a big mistake - you will learn to translate, maybe, but very few students will become fluent. And for those few, it will not be the result of taking classes, but something else -- like moving to another country or finding a native-speaking partner.

As long as you are translating in your head, you will not be fluent. My mom's English is ridiculously funny, because in spite of being in the US for decades she is translating phrases to English. She also tries to be colorful in her speech, and she should really have a YouTube channel, because half of the things she says are a riot.

So my goal as I'm learning Spanish now is to avoid translation as much as possible. Duolingo is not too bad for this - there are some pictures, and words are usually introduced with enough context to guess the meaning. Most excercises are transcription and speaking, or inserting words that make most sense, with a few translating questions.

I am doing tons of speaking review excercises (listen and repeat), which I think are the most useful ones. I avoid look

ing at the screen as I don't want to read, but rather listen, understand, and repeat. Recognizing entire phrases is a crucial skill, and even reading off-the screen engages entirely different parts of the brain.

Different languages are different, and the idea of one-to-one correspondence is a really terrible approach to learning.

Posted in: s/Language_Acquisition

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Mar 16 · 2 months ago · 👍 lykso, norayr, jmjl, corscada

1 Comment

🍭 jmjl · Mar 23 at 06:22:

Also because of the fact, that some languages have words that don't even have direct one-to-one correspondence, so translating a word in one language translates as a phrase, which even when knowing this, makes our brains not create a link.

Because there are multiple phrases you could translate the text to based on what you interpret of the sentence as a whole, and there are some sentences that could be translated to multiple things and or back, leaving multiple options. (These sentences are most often tried to be made and said by politicians)