r/languagelearning • u/Many-Doubt • 5h ago
When does translating words in your head stop feeling like a math problem? Discussion
I feel like I think so slow when I’m trying to speak Spanish. It feels less like I’m learning a new word for an object and more like I’m trying to remember a code word for something. I wish I could just look at something & immediately think of the Spanish word for something in the same way you look at a pair of shoes & know that they’re “tenis shoes”, “sneakers”, or “trainers” as if it was just another word for the object. My brain makes a direct connection to the English word & the concept in my brain but when I’m trying to practice Spanish it feels like I get stuck trying to remember each and every words direct translation instead of it feeling like I’m moving smoothly through a sentence.
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u/Signal_Slide4580 4h ago
Honestly, I cannot specify when this transition occurs. However, to provide you with a mental image, remember when you first learned to type and had to look down to see the letters. Over time, your fingers began to move intuitively, as you knew where the letters were located. This is analogous to how it feels when speaking in your target language. You build habits and learn how to link words, and at a certain point, it becomes second nature to intuitively know them. As a result, when someone speaks to you, instead of translating word for word, you conceptually understand what they are saying, much like in your native tongue, where you hear the words without translating everything at once.
When you speak in your target language, you develop habits that enable you to link words naturally. Over time, this process becomes second nature, allowing you to understand and respond intuitively. Additionally, when someone speaks to you, rather than translating each word individually, you grasp the overall concept, similar to how you comprehend your native language without consciously translating every word.
The fix to your problem is probably not going to sound fun but its practice and repetition. Like training for a sport you have to manually do it then it becomes automatic its the same for language and its really hard to fast pass this part of it but I believe you can.
Example: If someone said "Look at that boy riding the bike" You instantly know they are telling you to do something and to seek out someone on a bike.
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u/mtnbcn 🇺🇸 (N) | 🇪🇸 (B2) | 🇮🇹 (B2) | CAT (B1) | 🇫🇷 (A2?) 4h ago
When you get to that stage, a lot of people resist it still. You're watching a TV show, and you get what's going on, but you still say to yourself, "Ok, so he said, 'toma', and that means, 'take this', okay... that's the imperative, got it. He's giving a command, ok I understand." You get so used to feeling like you need to do that.
The best thing you can do is watch content and follow along. If you're reading, a lot of people can't just read, they have to stop and think about the words. "recoger", oh that looks like "coger"... etc. When you're watching or listening to something you understand without having time to translate. That counts! That's good.
If you want to practice producing speech without thinking, trying copying what you're watching and repeating. That way you're following along something that means something to you, looking at it, mentioning it, repeating real sentences. You don't have to just compose beautiful complex sentences without thinking. That comes later, you don't develop that skill before you already are used to short phrases that others used first or that you practiced saying many times.
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u/IAmGilGunderson 🇺🇸 N | 🇮🇹 (CILS B1) | 🇩🇪 A0 4h ago
For me its about the 10,000th time I have encountered the word. I'm kidding, but sometimes it feels like that.
Paul Nation, in some of the videos I have watched, says its about 12 times. But for me if it is that few than that would only be for recognition. For production the amount of "meetings" feels much great.
Over time you will naturally start to "chunk" pieces of sentences. Where those parts become natural and you are just filling in a word or two. "Today I went to the ____".
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u/-Mandarin 3h ago
Yeah, no way in hell it's only 12 times. Maybe for people particularly proficient in language, but it'd probably be closer to the 100 mark for me.
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u/Wanderlust-4-West 3h ago
Funny that this translation is EXACTLY the problem which ALG methods avoids, because I learn Spanish by directly understanding, rarely translating. I just had recently a video (about how to create comprehensible input) I needed to look it up to recall if it was in Spanish or English.
Try Dreaming Spanish, read about the experience on r/dreamingspanish - it might change how you learn languages. I know it changed how I learn - using immersion instead of memorizing: https://www.dreamingspanish.com/method
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u/aedionashryver18 🇩🇪 A2 3h ago
It just takes lots and lots of practice and repetition. u/Signal_Slide4580 made a great analogy about it being similar to learning how to type. After awhile it becomes second nature because it's more of a muscle memory. I've been studying German on and off for years, and there's certain words that I learned from song lyrics that I listened to over and over again because I enjoyed them until eventually I had the whole song memorized and could sing along. Now whenever I hear any of those words in German I instantly know what they mean because I've heard it so many times, so my brain has made a "shortcut" around the translation like it does as a native English speaker. After I memorized about 150 most used words, suddenly I could read in german and understood it without too much translation. It was a cool feeling.
It's just pattern recognition and repetition. Keep trying and don't give up. You got this!
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u/Notthatsmarty 4h ago
You can narrate things mentally with your target language. I think it helps to say something like “I’m opening to fridge’ in your head using the TL, by the 5th or 6th time it’ll just come to mind naturally.
There’s some things that even with fluency might take a second. Like, I know nuts and bolts in Spanish, but I never encounter nuts and bolts in my daily life so if I ever had to say it I’d have a delay in my ability to recall the word. I think reading also helps in many ways than just for this.
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u/Onlyfatwomenarefat 4h ago
Force yourself to think in Spanish. Instead of thinking "what do I need to buy at the supermarket tonight?", think "que necesito comprar esta noche?" Then with time you won't have to make an effort anymore, it will comme naturally.
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 2h ago
If you spend all your time with Spanish with flashcards, grammar books, analytic computation/dissection, and translation, then that will be the automatic and trained response your brain has when encountering Spanish.
For an alternative approach, try Dreaming Spanish. The idea is to watch material you can understand at 80%+ without any lookups. Try to relax and absorb the overall message. As much as possible, don't analyze, dissect, try to catch and think about individual words, etc. Just follow along with the simple speech and the visuals the teacher provides (pictures/gestures/drawings) to understand the core of what's being communicated.
If you spend a few hundred hours listening like this, gradually moving up the playlists in difficulty, then you will teach your brain that the automatic response it should have to Spanish is to relax and comprehend.
Here is a long post I wrote about learning via listening.
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u/metrocello 1h ago
I speak English and Spanish. I generally don’t translate from one to the other when I speak in either language unless I know how to say the thing, or idea, in one but not the other. That sometimes gives me pause. People often ask me how they can improve their language skills. For me, I had the benefit of living in places where those languages were spoken. That helped, but I firmly believe that consuming media in your target language is the single easiest and productive way to advance you language skills. If you’re trying to learn Spanish, listen to music, movies and TV in Spanish. Get on Spanish YouTube and TikTok and Reddit. People aren’t always kind, but you’ll learn a lot. Once you get past a certain point of book-learning, there’s no substitute for just putting it in your ear.
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u/Charming_Comedian_44 🇺🇸N | 🇪🇸C1 | 🇭🇺A1 4h ago edited 1h ago
It just takes time. Like you mentioned it’s exhausting to constantly translate what you want to say in your head before you say it. Here in lies the problem.
You need to stop learning words by thinking about what the words literally translate to. This may be weird or uncomfortable at first but it’s how you get past constant back and forth translation in conversation.
When you learn and try to memorize a new word, for one try to use the Spanish definition and not the English translation, but more importantly, try and think of the concept when you see or hear it.
For example, the word for apple is manzana. Try your best to not think of the English word “apple” when you see it. Instead picture an apple in your mind and make an effort to associate that image and idea with the word.
This is what you do in your native language and is ultimately the point you need to reach with Spanish to achieve fluency and remove the mental burden of constant translation.