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.