Iversen wrote:After the conference in Thessaloniki I had three more days in the town, and throughout these three days I tried to stick to Greek in my head as much I could. In actual fact I lacked some vocabulary for some of my conversations there so I couldn't make those three days a 100% pure Hellenophonic experience, but when yoy are surrounded by a target language day and night and keep looking words up it isn't nearly as hard as it sounds to keep up an inner dialog, not even in a weak language. It is much harder at home, where my TV spews out an unhealthy mix of Danish and English and I am inundated by texts in the same two languages - other languages do enter this pandemonion, but I have to invite them - or in some case drag them inside the trap, kicking and screaming and much against their will.
I have described the mental state where your brain is summing in another language than the usual one(s) as a 'buzz' and claimed that it is a necessary step for me if I want to get fluent (in the sense of prolific) in a language - which isn't the same as claiming that I'll automatically utter idiomatic and correct sentences in the language (it takes some hard study to get there). The actual time I'm speaking the foreign language in such a situation as far less than the time I'm thinking it, but I'm not in panic about this (as little as I'm in panic over speeking Greek with a Danish accent). The main problem is that (in this case) three days aren't nearly enough to make thinking in the language such an ingrown habit that I can keep on doing it at home. At home my thinking in a weak language will always take an added effort which ultimately reduces the effect of doing it.
And therefore I ought to travel some more.
This is an interesting post: I agree with everything you say, but I'm interested to hear what you consider to be "thinking in your target language"? If we naturally think without words, then what does it mean to say that we have "reached a point where we are thinking in our target language"? To me, this says a lot more about the sheer amount of time that you've spent
trying to think and/or use your target language, much more than it says about your actual level.
For example, a month after I started learning Chinese, I had a dream that I was in a Mexican gas station, and there was a Chinese man talking to the Mexican attendant, and they were having trouble communicating. In the dream, I was able to step in and successfully translate between the two people, and then I had a short conversation in Chinese with the man. I distinctly remember all the words that were being said, and I remember surprising myself with my level.
I told my friend what happened and they were all astounded: "You dreamt in Chinese?! That must mean you've reached fluency!" Umm, no, it means that you can consider me legally insane for spending so much damn time thinking about languages
My actual Chinese level was horrible... at that point, I couldn't understand anything that native speakers said. It was just a result of having spent a lot of time thinking about Chinese, translation, and the general concept of what it means to have two people that "speak different languages". Said nothing about my actual level.
leosmith wrote:As to the question of whether we should make a conscious effort to make "thinking practice" part of our language learning plan, I don't do it, and I see it as a waste of time in my case. First, I figure actual conversation, combined with all my other learning activities, would make thinking practice superfluous.
The ability to converse in another language without consciously translating comes to me naturally, meaning it's not something I have to specifically train. I just converse a lot, listen, read, write, etc, and before too long I'm doing it. So it pains me to hear certain highly reputed polyglots tell me that thinking practice is a necessary step. This is clearly false. But I think it's just flawed logic that makes them say this stuff, they don't really believe it. By that I mean they don't understand that if a statement isn't always true, then it's a false statement. Benny's book is full of such statements, and it drives me nuts.
I agree with you for the most part here, except that I would argue that a "conscious effort for thinking practice" is indeed absolutely vital, whether that be purely in the form of conversation or a healthy mix of conversation and writing (probably the most realistic option, unless you're surrounded by native speakers). However, "thinking" does not mean "talking to yourself in your head", but rather it means that you need to take time to produce output, in whatever form that it may be. In fact, I would say that self-talking is probably the least productive form of "conscious thinking practice", precisely because it is much easier to think without words, and because we can't get corrected.
In any case, I 100% agree with you about Benny...
