Bidirectional Translation

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tommus
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Re: Bidirectional Translation

Postby tommus » Fri Dec 15, 2017 2:23 pm

I am still trying to figure out a "technique" of learning things better. This discussion seems to simultaneously be talking about written bidirectional translation, and speaking spontaneously without overly concentrating on individual words.
Cainntear wrote:What you have to start to think about is whether you're "feeling" the meaning of the words as you're saying them. If you can look at the first few words of a sentence and know exactly what the translation is without thinking about what the words mean, your brain is just memorising and you need to change technique.

I think it is often overlooked just what a high proportion of language consists of expressions as opposed to individual words. So very often, a group of words has a meaning that is significantly different than the literal meaning of the words themselves; in other words, language is full of expressions. So when you are reading such expressions, it would be better to "feel" the meaning of the assembled words rather than "thinking" about the meaning of the individual words. In fact, is it not counter productive to try to memorise the individual words than to somehow memorise the expression? In my own reading (and especially intensive reading), I am now spending a lot more time on learning ways of saying things (expression building) than on memorising individual words (vocabulary building). And bidirectional written translation with comparison seems like a powerful technique. Bidirectional spoken translation with comparison is probably just as effective.
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Cainntear
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Re: Bidirectional Translation

Postby Cainntear » Fri Dec 15, 2017 5:55 pm

tommus wrote:I think it is often overlooked just what a high proportion of language consists of expressions as opposed to individual words. So very often, a group of words has a meaning that is significantly different than the literal meaning of the words themselves; in other words, language is full of expressions. So when you are reading such expressions, it would be better to "feel" the meaning of the assembled words rather than "thinking" about the meaning of the individual words.

Oh, certainly. If you're thinking about the meaning of individual words when you're reading an idiom or fixed phrase, you won't be thinking of the meaning of the sentence, which is the point of what I'm saying -- if you aren't thinking of the meaning of what you're saying, you're doing mechanical work, and that ain't language.
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Re: Bidirectional Translation

Postby neuroascetic » Fri Dec 22, 2017 2:04 pm

The principle of bidirectional translation is not too dissimilar from a technique that Benjamin Franklin used for learning essay writing. I read this in a book by Geoff Colvin called Talent is Overrated years ago:

Franklin then embarked on a remarkable program that few of us would ever have thought of.

It began with his reading a Spectator article and making brief notes on the meaning of each sentence; a few days later he would take up the notes and try to express the meaning of each sentence in his own words. When done, he compared his essay with the original, "discovered some of my faults, and corrected them."
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