こんにちは、みなさん
まず、僕のことをおしえます
I picked up Japanese three years ago, but I never really committed to it. Last week I finally got serious, starting back from the basics and I’m having a lot of fun with different study methods. (textbooks, flashcards, active listening, games, etc)
But one thing that’s really bothering me is that whenever I listen or read a word, or even when I try to say something, my head feels the need to translate that sentence first before I can fully process it, even if it’s a word I’m very familiar with.
My native language is Portuguese(Brazil), and I learned English when I was very young, so I don’t remember a whole lot about the process of going through a new language.
Does this habit ever go away, or do you simply go through the process of translating in your head way faster as time goes on? How did it work for you guys?
10 comments
you have to explicitly practice what you want and stop yourself when you do what you don’t want
practice reading, writing, listening, and speaking without letting yourself put english words in your head
no one is going to be able to reach into your mind to do it for you
do note that this is an important realization of yours – it’s good that you caught this tendency now before it went on any longer. the longer you let this run, the harder it is to eradicate later
You can force yourself to try and read faster, or listen without pausing, which doesn’t give you time to translate things. Although, if you don’t know enough words to do this then that’s a different problem.
After you reach a certain level, I recommend not thinking about it, and speaking reflexively. At first you’ll sound stupid, but after a while you’ll notice your speed going up drastically. Your native language is Portuguese, right? Do you think about the words or grammar when speaking English? Probably not, right? Now practice doing the same in Japanese (this does require a good level of proficiency)
I’m a casual learner, but I grew up bilingual and I remember precisely that as a kid I always translated in one direction or the other. I don’t know if it goes away or if it just gets faster, either way it stopped disrupting the flow on its own. I think it helped me connect the two languages, so my advice is that you focus on progress and see if it goes away as you get better
When I was a beginner through intermediate student, I would practice ‘thinking’ in Japanese by reflecting on something that happened to me during the day or in my life recently, and I would imagine how I would retell the story to a Japanese person. It started out as a very concious effort activity, and I would need to look up lots of words I didn’t know, to be able to express what I wanted to say.
Eventually though, without me even realizing it, it became much less of an effort to switch my thoughts to Japanese (particularly after I had been living in Japan for awhile). Even if I didn’t look up every single word, I had enough ability to talk around the words I didn’t know and explain in longer sentences to make up for the lack of specific vocab. Nowadays, my thoughts are probably 60% English and 40% Japanese, and on some days closer to half and half.
> I picked up Japanese three years ago, but I never really committed to it. Last week I finally got serious
you dont need to worry about “thinking in japanese” just yet. like at all.
I’m still quite early in, but I’ve begun looking at graded readers. The extremely basic ones have a lot of pictures (I have a baby vocabulary). I’ve actually found it helpful to look at a picture while hearing the word in Japanese. It skips the translation step. This obviously doesn’t work for everything, but maybe you can stop trying to translate a lot of nouns and verbs this way
I’m not at the level in Japanese where this is a problem yet however I just seriously broke through this issue in German recently. Something that really helped me was have a true mastery over very simple and useful phrases in the language.
When someone is saying something it’s extremely common to be responding even though you aren’t talking. Some common examples in English would saying things like – for sure, that’s right, of course, definitely, yes, no etc… And I think when you have common answers to questions or phrases and start your response with those it helps your mind switch over. It also gives your brain time to think like using “hmmm or ummmm”.
e.g. The other person is saying something about how your language level is good (this will be a pretty common comment said to you as a language learner). You can respond to so many situations and comments like this by saying, thank you…. certainly not…. of course.. (then say) my Japanese is not very good at the moment but I enjoy it. (something along these lines). Then follow up with another sentence with whatever you want. But this gives your brain a little bit of time to think as well as signaling to switch over and then common sentence is so simple and reusable you won’t even be thinking about it.
In German I would always say something like that’s right (das stimmt) or actually?(eigentlich) just to say anything and then when applicable use a sentence you already know and use quite frequently. Then before long the next sentence and the sentence after will just flow out in the new language.
Poor explanation on my part I’m rushed but hope it helps:)
Nothing is worse then having a conversation with someone and you understand what they said and you have the grammar and words to respond but It’s just a jumble in your head. This way it’ll ease you into responding or talking.
> Does this habit ever go away
There are two prerequisites for it to stop, you will have to know all the words and all the grammar of a sentence to be able to absorb it just like that. And it won’t work if you just learned them yesterday, but let’s say you are familiar with them for at least half a year.
Cure Dolly has some suggestion on how to get there:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhG0gfjRnvc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhG0gfjRnvc)
TL;DR: Reading without a dictionary, getting a language buddy, defining words in Japanese, etc.