Avoiding the Translation Crutch in Language Learning

[golyplot]

Too much translating back and forth during a conversation not only slows things down, but it can lead to awkward calques of native language phrases. (Like when English-speaking Esperanto learners say *'Prenu vian tempon.' "Take" your time? Take it from whom?)

I sometimes have the opposite problem, where when something is said they same way in another language, I second-guess myself and think that I'm just translating from English and got it wrong.


On a side note/rant, this is especially problematic in ASL. Due to the heavy English influence in ASL, learners will commonly see both English calques and people decrying the same. It is very difficult to judge whether your interlocutor is speaking "proper" ASL and to what extent any given usage is accepted or not in the community.

It doesn't help that ASL is not as clearly defined and cohesive as say, French. If you go to France and talk to people, you can have reasonable confidence that they grew up speaking French with other French people and that there is a large degree of uniformity in the language. But most deaf children are born to hearing parents and raised speaking English and only discover ASL and the Deaf community later in life.

[tangleweeds]

fair evaluation:
Translation as a language learning method: the ultimate guide

https://howtogetfluent.com/translation- ... ng-method/

In the widest sense, this is part of a broader move from the more extreme forms of the “communicative method” to some readmission of L1 as a language of instruction in the classroom.

I think using L1 as a language of instruction is vital, but I think pure L2 time with native speakers is just as vital. Eleanor Harz Jorden's Japanese: The Spoken Language gets dinged a lot, but when I studied it in a program run by a student of Marie Noda's, I got both, which was awesome.

The aforementioned English-speaking student of Noda's who administered the program gave us 1 or 2 hours (depending on which year) of instruction on grammar/culture (entirely interwoven) to every 3 hours of time we spent using nothing but Japanese with the native speaker TAs (we had three of them to cover all this small group time). Quizzes and a few assignments involved translation, but most of our homework was practicing from tapes of the audiolingual drills, which we were expected to be able to act out situations from using props etc during our Japanese-only class time. I came out of the program pretty good at speaking and listening, but, like many JSL graduates, pretty much entirely illiterate (but, for better or worse, really, really good at working with any style of romaji you might throw at me. If nothing else, typing Japanese on the computer is a breeze!)

Japanese: The Writtten Language is still (very) slowly evolving into publication, thanks to Ms Noda, even though EHJ passed on quite while back now, but that does me no good. I'm re-learning by reviewing JSL using the Japanese language supplement meant for the native speaker TA's whenever possible, then studying from Minna no Nihongo, where the main textbook and most of the supplementary workbooks and suchlike are written entirely in Japanese.

Full disclosure: I have never absorbed anything useful in classrooms that try to use nothing but the target language to teach grammer and points of usage. The teacher invariably unconsciously uses too much vocabulary and grammar variants that have not been covered in the class. This has always driven me completely mad. Fortunately, I excel at RTFM so I just study the textbook carefully, and I've always gotten top grades and even won statewide language awards, but no thanks to the that particular aspect of the "fully immersive" classroom.

[Cainntear]

While the principle is sound, there's no real substance to the article.
Summary:

You've got to avoid translating. Well, not always. It's fine when you start. But you've got to avoid it later, when it's a bad thing.

That's not particularly useful, particularly given the title. That's not "avoiding" translating, it's stopping translating, so sadly the article overall only serves to confuse the reader.

The discussion here has been far more productive, and here's my take on it.

If you use an image to represent a word, you're using a pictogram, and pictograms are a form of writing.

Consider...

[Dammit. I had written a little rebus using Unicode emojis, but the forum software rejected it for using "unsupported characters". You'll have to imagine the icon in place of the word or phrase in square brackets. Kind of ruins my point.]

Ieri, sono andato in [turning arrows] nella mia [car]. Sfortunatamente, sono rimasto senza [fuel pump] e avevo bisogno di [telephone] a una autofficina, ma non avevo [mobile phone reception symbol], quindi sono comminciato a [walking man] verso il paese più vicino.
Yesterday, I took my [car] out for a [turning arrows]. Unfortunately, I ran out of [fuel pump] and had to [phone] a garage, but I didn't have any [mobile phone reception symbol], so I started [walking man]ing towards the nearest village.

Now, you may not know the correct word for one or more of those symbols in one or other of the languages, and if so, what happened? Did you hear/see/feel the word from your own language? In fact, did you perhaps even hear/see/feel the word from your own language even for some of the words that you did know?

I'm sure that's something we've all experienced with numbers written in digits, for example. There you are, happily reading away in your target language, and then as soon as your eyes hit "254", suddenly you're hearing your native language in your internal ear.

So we all know that symbols evoke our first language, but we try to kid ourselves that a simple image that we see repeatedly referring to the same word is not a "symbol" at all, but a picture. Not always simple pictures, you say? Some resources use photographs? That is true, but then they tend to repeat them, and reduce them to icons... pictograms... words.

Really, the problem hear isn't whether you use the L1 orthography or the pictogram to represent the word, it's overpractising isolated words and phrases. That's where I think Anki (for all its benefits) falls down -- you can't get variety without a deliberately designed course. I also don't think Duolingo fills this gap either, as it just makes the isolated examples bigger and more complex, rather than moving away from them completely.

It's only when we are faced with tasks where we have to apply the rules quickly and on the fly to generate novel utterances that we learn to stop translating, because it's just not efficient. But precious few courses or learning materials force us to do this -- and this is one of the things I always admired about the Michel Thomas course: you never said the same thing twice and you never knew what was coming next, so you had to build up the sentence from component parts. Yes, you did that by translation, but I never felt it taught me "to translate" -- rather, it taught me how to produce sentences.

[mcthulhu]

This principle is particularly awkward if you happen to be a translator.

[Kamlari]

Many things are lost in translation.
E.g.

I'm a student / I am a student.
Jestem studentem / Jestem studentką.
Je suis étudiant / Je suis étudiante.
Я студент / Я студентка.
学生です。 /　学生だ。　/　学生である。　/　学生であります。　/　学生でございます。　/　学生。

BUT
to learn a language you need:

1. TIME
(ninety seconds a minute)
2. EMOTIONS
the closer to "flow", the better - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
3. MEANING: personally relevant, massive comprehensible exposure.
4. EFFICIENT ACTION:
Goals
Means/Tools
Control
(yourself, somebody else)
5. L1 language skills and general knowledge

To progress really fast you need a good, literal translation.
Examples of authentic texts for zero beginners. English, French, German for speakers of Polish.
https://i.postimg.cc/CxZnSFVb/Le-Petit-Prince.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/fLYgFnLN/Alice-In-Wonderland.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/P5Ly9s3R/Rotk-ppchen.jpg
pic upload

Full, copyright free, texts are here:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_ ... mL-R/ai.7z
The translations are free for personal use.

You need a good, professional recording, too.
Try YouTube.

[Kraut]

I'm using the bidirectional method with texts from the Internet that I translate myself. If they are linear with a logical sequence of events and if I focus on the "mental concepts" I can memorize a complete text - the translation is gone.
This is what I did yesterday:

Alojamiento con perro

[tangleweeds]

That's not particularly useful, particularly given the title. That's not "avoiding" translating, it's stopping translating, so sadly the article overall only serves to confuse the reader.

Touché! Precisely.

So we all know that symbols evoke our first language

This I'll quibble with. Research is finally confirming that a significant proportion of us don't generally think in words. Whatever language I'm going to speak in, even English (N), I need to pause to find words for my thoughts. So it's not hard for me to suppress English when attaching a different language to pictures or mental images. (The numbers do indeed want to pop into English though, for the reasons we discussed in the numbers thread elsewhere).

Really, the problem hear isn't whether you use the L1 orthography or the pictogram to represent the word, it's overpractising isolated words and phrases. you can't get variety without a deliberately designed course.

This point you make often, and I don't necessarily agree, or else I need you to elaborate more, as I apparently don't understand. My problem with courses is exactly that they all seem to overpractice a limited set of patterns, so I end up needing to compare courses to find alternative wordings of the same concepts/situations, to help me understand how that particular language can "flex". I can see why courses are designed that way to avoid confusing more naive/first time language learners, it just doesn't help me.

I'm the one who always ended up buying a few alternate textbooks (cheap, used, previous editions) to get different angles of view on whatever they were trying to teaching, from math to languages to political science, because otherwise I have too many unresolved questions hampering my working memory. I generally need to work things out from a completely different angle to resolve these.

It's only when we are faced with tasks where we have to apply the rules quickly and on the fly to generate novel utterances that we learn to stop translating, because it's just not efficient. But precious few courses or learning materials force us to do this -- and this is one of the things I always admired about the Michel Thomas course: you never said the same thing twice and you never knew what was coming next, so you had to build up the sentence from component parts. Yes, you did that by translation, but I never felt it taught me "to translate" -- rather, it taught me how to produce sentences.

OK, now this makes me want to check out Michel Thomas. Thank you!

[Cainntear]

Research is finally confirming that a significant proportion of us don't generally think in words.

That's not what I said though. My argument is that an icon/glyph/pictogram is a semiotic symbol and that looking at it is a process of reading, and that that's how flashcards work. This is why we get the situation referred to above:

Drops, quoted above, by default does not show you the English meaning of a pictogram except for the very first time you are introduced to said pictogram. Honestly, I find it very difficult to remember what each pictogram is supposed to represent. They've gotten better since they first started, but I had to set it to always show me the English meaning because I might know that *picture* means I should choose *word* but I have completely forgotten what *picture* actually is and it's vague enough to mean any of "hello", "to leave", "to walk", etc.

I've had this experience myself -- knowing that the card represents a certain string of sounds and/or letters, but not knowing the what or why of it. As I recall it, when using LiveMocha I had to actively recall the English meaning or I slipped into a pattern of behavioristic rote association of image and wordform with no reference to semantics.

The more you see the same image, the less you interpret it as an image and the more you interpret it as a pictogram. It doesn't matter that you don't think in images -- the moment your brain starts reading, you're in the realms of language.

It's only when we are faced with tasks where we have to apply the rules quickly and on the fly to generate novel utterances that we learn to stop translating, because it's just not efficient. But precious few courses or learning materials force us to do this -- and this is one of the things I always admired about the Michel Thomas course: you never said the same thing twice and you never knew what was coming next, so you had to build up the sentence from component parts. Yes, you did that by translation, but I never felt it taught me "to translate" -- rather, it taught me how to produce sentences.

OK, now this makes me want to check out Michel Thomas. Thank you!

Caution: this is not one of the published principles of MT, so the branded courses by teachers other than Thomas himself don't always follow this. It's been years since I've used them, but my recollection is that several of the teachers have a tendency to fall into pattern substitutions -- i.e. sequences like "I want to buy a T-shirt... I want to buy a newspaper... I want to buy an ice-cream" (and given the example I've pulled out of my head, I suspect that I found the Japanese course particularly guilty of this). This type of exercise is all too common in all areas of teaching, where it's often explicitly presented as a grammar exercise, but as the learner never has the need to recall the grammar, in essence it's just a vocabulary exercise dressed up as a grammar exercise. This is the biggest problem with the vast majority of language learning resources: dressing up vocab as grammar, and hardly doing any real grammar practice.

[TeoLanguages]

Let me disagree with the premise of this thread. I personally deem translation a crucial crutch at least as a beginner because it allows me dissect the unknown patterns way easier and faster compared to what I'd do if I delve directly in the foreign language. Starting from an intermediate stage I find more fruitful to progressively distance from your native language trying to only think in the new one.