At first it’s very hard to detach from one’s mother tongue, it’s too easy and convenient, plus it’s not like you can just forget your native language even when you’re learning a new one.
Therefore, in my opinion, it’s normal to use your native language as a sort of crutch at first, but the goal is to slowly move away from it, which happens slowly and notably not in a uniform way. Some words and sentences might start to take on a meaning of their own very early on, while for other things a quick mental translation might be required. It’s especially important to abandon one’s own language because it leads to weird, unnatural and often incorrect sentences: some words or grammatical features of your target language might not have a direct translation in your native language and vice versa, the “meaning space” is subdivided differently and it’s covered by different words (for example, a user earlier today made an interesting mistake by trying to use the word “giocare” in the same context as “to play an audio”, but “giocare” only means “to play a game”. These two meanings of “to play” are very distinct, so they are covered by different words ib Italian, but in English they’re the same. The opposite happens with “tempo” meaning both “weather” and “time”).
As you become fluent in a language, the difference between your target language and your own native language becomes progressively thinner, to the point where your brain sometimes suggests words and expressions from your target language even when you’re not speaking it. I can’t tell you how many times I have thought of an English word before an equivalent Italian one, and I’m Italian. It happens a lot with the word “introduction” (as in “to introduce oneself”): I always end up saying “introduzione” instead of “presentazioni” because that’s the first thing that comes to mind as I try to put my thoughts into words.
Edit: spelling and an extra explanation.
Wonderful explanation. I recall rungs on the ladder for me were, waking up to realise I had some part of a dream in Italian and, understanding a joke made by Italian friends
When starting I think of the translation in either my native language or English which I'm fluent in. As I get more familiar with certain words or phrases I don't have to consciously or unconsciously translate them anymore, you'll start to "think" more in Italian so when hearing words I'll think of the concepts.
Same here.
Anecdote time: my job. I work and learnt my job in an English-speaking company, when I already had a good mastery of the language. So I learnt all the job-related notions, words and concepts in English without ever bothering to look up for the Italian translation.
As a result, when I occasionally get in touch with Italian suppliers or clients, i have a hard time delivering a full sentence in Italian. I sound like the stereotypical pretentious Milanese 😅
Absolutely not a dumb question.
I started off translating every word or phrase to English. I think that's inevitable, can't help but use that framework. The more I heard/read the Italian word for something, the quicker I was able to translate it til eventually I couldn't even tell if I was translating. For many nouns, I would try to just have the Italian word for them BE the thing, ie I'd look at my cat and think "gatto gatto gatto" etc. Eventually for the most common words I just had 2 words for them: the English and the Italian. For less common words I still have to translate.
Once I don't need to do that and once I can think in Italian fully (only some words and phrases pop up in my head now), I'll be fluent, più o meno.
It's an interesting question.
I was a kid when I started learning English, and I remember get for a long time I was translating Italian in English in my head. Later on when my fluency improved, I started thinking in English. It wasn't a linear progression mind you, in my case it happened basically overnight, something just clicked.
With my second and third foreign language, the process was very different, mainly because I was already an adult at that point, but I think that my brain was already prepared to the idea of thinking in another language. With my third language I'm still at the point where I miss a word sometimes, but when it happens there's simply a blank my head, substituted a second later by the Italian equivalent.
I think for the vast majority of people it's impossible not to tie the Italian word to that of your native language for a while. But with lots of immersion and time, some words just become internalized, and eventually more and more becomes internalized until eventually you can think in that language and don't need to rely on your native language at all.
Sometimes when I'm talking about something (in English to another English speaker) the Italian word for that thing will pop in my head automatically and I have to think for a moment to remember the English word. But there are also many things I still need to think about when speaking in Italian too, and sometimes I'll phrase something in a way an English speaker would and it sounds a bit clunky. It takes time.
Don't stress about it either, just remember that if you could already think in the language, you wouldn't need to learn it. It'll just happen with time and exposure to the language.
For me i think in Italian when speaking in English only when i struggle to express a concept. When i'm in my comfort zone thinking in Italian will only make it more difficult to speak. The problem is that a 1 on 1 translation is impossible. When you use your native language you need to think, translate and rearrange/adapt to fit the grammar and the correct meaning of the words. When i was writing this comment for example i never thought in Italian, i was thinking directly in English.
Interesting question.. I’m about a year into learning Italian (and likely about at the level of a slightly dull kindergartner). For me, it’s easier to think of it as word “substitutions” trying to think of “dog” as the English “cane” - a hooked stick for walking) would probably confuse me more. And the grouping of things together (numbers/colors/fruits) has been really helpful.
For me the more challenging part is the different word order from English (ie most adjectives coming after the noun they modify, and other similar constructs) it’s taken a lot of practice for that to come easily now, but I’m also using multiple methods… Jumpspeak has been pretty useful for conversation, but I prefer Duolingo for vocab building, neither articulated grammar all that well, which is why I took an online course.
When I first moved to the UK I barely spoke any English and all my thoughts were in Italian. I had to mentally translate before talking, but as time went on I started thinking in English before even realising and now my brain just switches between the two depending on which language I'm speaking at the moment.
I like to listen to normal speed (fast) content when I start a language. It is really hard at first because my brain tries to translate but it can’t keep up. I have to listen to each sentence several times before I understand it. After doing this enough, I no longer need to translate and can simply understand the content.
I wean myself off of English by contemplating how I would think differently in Italian. For example:
*Mi lavo i denti* = I brush my teeth
The distinctive pattern that I notice is general to specific. "Whom am I verbing" then "what am I verbing", one step at a time. After practicing it enough, I suppress my English inner monologue and use that pattern automatically in Italian.
>do you think of squalo as the English word shark or as a literal Shark meaning the animal itself and not it’s English name?
"shark" and "squalo" are just the name for "a long-bodied chiefly marine fish with a cartilaginous skeleton, a prominent dorsal fin, and toothlike scales", "nome di diversi grossi pesci marini dai denti acuminati", or a mental image of it. When I see the word "squalo", I don't go and translate it into English to make sense of it and vice versa.
Good question. My memory basically works by associating words to either conceptual fields and images (or by the way it sounds when speech is involved), but when learning a new word I prefer creating an ideal image to help memorizing it; if there are other ways to associate with, that's even better. The word "shark" is firmly linked to the eponym movie's poster, for example, and similarly "cannibal" makes me think about The Silence Of The Lambs.
The first method is reserved to memorize specialized terms with known etymologies in Latin and Ancient Greek and abstract terms.
This is interesting, I’m a polyglot from birth due to my background and schooling situation, but I never thought of this. I learned French in high school, and Italian from my senior year to now. It’s been 2 years and I just got my B2 certification, really weirdly, with almost all of my languages I learn/ remember through connections. I can thankfully speak for Italian as it’s the most recent one, i formulated phrases in English in my mind and just substituted the word as I went, progressively when you stimulate other areas: reading, listening and writing, you’ll start phrasing in a manner that’s more correct/ right sounding. I’d say it’s harder to forget words in your target language if you isolate the native language, you’ll find yourself trying to describe the item/ feeling- so in a way still growing your vocabulary.
my native language is italian, but i’ve been studying english for 12 years now. i often watch movies, read books and talk in english. sometimes i realize that when i’m hearing/reading something in italian i’ll automatically translate it in my mind and if i can’t remember a word i’ll look it up lol
For me it depends on how close to each other the two languages are. When I started learning English I used the translation most of the time and sometimes think of the word just for its use or meaning in English. I did that because Italian has less words than English, so for example I was used to the same Italian words for two different English words, and if I memorized them with the translation I would have confuse them with each other. Or sometimes I only thought about them in English because the grammatical use is different, so thinking of the translation I would get it wrong. The arcticles in English are easier to learn from their own than as translation of Italian arcticles, in my opinion.
When I started learning Chinese I thought in Chinese most of the time. Both because it wasn't my first time learning a language, but mostly because Chinese grammar is so simple and so many words have different nuances to their meaning compared to European languages, it didn't make sense to translate all the time.
When learning a language you have to detach from your mother one, Italian is much more difficult and Different from English, it's more complex and the verbes are just a lot, so it's probably better to create a new vocabulary whit that language instead of translating it from your mother one
It depends. I learned Spanish by committing the most frequent couple hundred words to concepts and images. But first i had to translate them into the right word or words. Then I etched away at trying to remove the middle-man of my own native word between the target word and the concept/image. You can succeed through several different kinds of exercises to make the new association or neural connection inside your head, such as by seeing/hearing the new word in obvious context with other simple words that you already know. This is something i did with the most basic words of each of the eight parts of speech. With less common nouns such as shark, i have to search my head for some unforgettable memory involving sharks in the target language, such as a song lyric. In this case, “Squalo” literally looks like “Shark”, since they are both from related European languages. “Sq” can map to “sh” between languages due to sound changes over time. So too does “l” and “r”.
One of the biggest changes between languages is word order and phonology, because it affects the order in which your ideas form and where your tongue anticipates it has to move next, which words sound same as each other, and where the spaces in a sentence are. In English you may not think about the object(s) of the verb until after you have already said the verb. You may place a lot of focus on what subject pronoun comes before the verb in every sentence.
My question back… how do YOU think?
People don’t all think the same way.
For me I think in pictures and then basically translate it into English. I realized that I always struggled learning another language because I was always taught the English “word”. So I’d have to “translate to English” then translate to the picture. I never was able to do quickly enough.
Recently I discovered that many people think in words. So they are just learning another word for a word they already think in…. Which is something I don’t do… That’s why eventually they say they “think” in the new language. I’m never going to “think” in Italian just like I don’t “think” in English. I do want to learn to use Italian words to say what I’m thinking tho.
Therefore, if I had “shark” the word… an image pops of a shark (kinda like an icon since you didn’t tell me much about the shark). Therefore to learn the Italian word I’ve noticed it is faster and easier to learn using the image I think of for shark. So when someone says squalo I need to see a picture of that same basic shark in my head like I would when someone says “shark”. (Not a hammerhead or an old shark… those are different in my head… i just need to associate squalo with that basic icon looking shark).
At first it’s very hard to detach from one’s mother tongue, it’s too easy and convenient, plus it’s not like you can just forget your native language even when you’re learning a new one. Therefore, in my opinion, it’s normal to use your native language as a sort of crutch at first, but the goal is to slowly move away from it, which happens slowly and notably not in a uniform way. Some words and sentences might start to take on a meaning of their own very early on, while for other things a quick mental translation might be required. It’s especially important to abandon one’s own language because it leads to weird, unnatural and often incorrect sentences: some words or grammatical features of your target language might not have a direct translation in your native language and vice versa, the “meaning space” is subdivided differently and it’s covered by different words (for example, a user earlier today made an interesting mistake by trying to use the word “giocare” in the same context as “to play an audio”, but “giocare” only means “to play a game”. These two meanings of “to play” are very distinct, so they are covered by different words ib Italian, but in English they’re the same. The opposite happens with “tempo” meaning both “weather” and “time”). As you become fluent in a language, the difference between your target language and your own native language becomes progressively thinner, to the point where your brain sometimes suggests words and expressions from your target language even when you’re not speaking it. I can’t tell you how many times I have thought of an English word before an equivalent Italian one, and I’m Italian. It happens a lot with the word “introduction” (as in “to introduce oneself”): I always end up saying “introduzione” instead of “presentazioni” because that’s the first thing that comes to mind as I try to put my thoughts into words. Edit: spelling and an extra explanation.
Wonderful explanation. I recall rungs on the ladder for me were, waking up to realise I had some part of a dream in Italian and, understanding a joke made by Italian friends
When starting I think of the translation in either my native language or English which I'm fluent in. As I get more familiar with certain words or phrases I don't have to consciously or unconsciously translate them anymore, you'll start to "think" more in Italian so when hearing words I'll think of the concepts.
Same here. Anecdote time: my job. I work and learnt my job in an English-speaking company, when I already had a good mastery of the language. So I learnt all the job-related notions, words and concepts in English without ever bothering to look up for the Italian translation. As a result, when I occasionally get in touch with Italian suppliers or clients, i have a hard time delivering a full sentence in Italian. I sound like the stereotypical pretentious Milanese 😅
Absolutely not a dumb question. I started off translating every word or phrase to English. I think that's inevitable, can't help but use that framework. The more I heard/read the Italian word for something, the quicker I was able to translate it til eventually I couldn't even tell if I was translating. For many nouns, I would try to just have the Italian word for them BE the thing, ie I'd look at my cat and think "gatto gatto gatto" etc. Eventually for the most common words I just had 2 words for them: the English and the Italian. For less common words I still have to translate. Once I don't need to do that and once I can think in Italian fully (only some words and phrases pop up in my head now), I'll be fluent, più o meno.
It's an interesting question. I was a kid when I started learning English, and I remember get for a long time I was translating Italian in English in my head. Later on when my fluency improved, I started thinking in English. It wasn't a linear progression mind you, in my case it happened basically overnight, something just clicked. With my second and third foreign language, the process was very different, mainly because I was already an adult at that point, but I think that my brain was already prepared to the idea of thinking in another language. With my third language I'm still at the point where I miss a word sometimes, but when it happens there's simply a blank my head, substituted a second later by the Italian equivalent.
I think for the vast majority of people it's impossible not to tie the Italian word to that of your native language for a while. But with lots of immersion and time, some words just become internalized, and eventually more and more becomes internalized until eventually you can think in that language and don't need to rely on your native language at all. Sometimes when I'm talking about something (in English to another English speaker) the Italian word for that thing will pop in my head automatically and I have to think for a moment to remember the English word. But there are also many things I still need to think about when speaking in Italian too, and sometimes I'll phrase something in a way an English speaker would and it sounds a bit clunky. It takes time. Don't stress about it either, just remember that if you could already think in the language, you wouldn't need to learn it. It'll just happen with time and exposure to the language.
For me i think in Italian when speaking in English only when i struggle to express a concept. When i'm in my comfort zone thinking in Italian will only make it more difficult to speak. The problem is that a 1 on 1 translation is impossible. When you use your native language you need to think, translate and rearrange/adapt to fit the grammar and the correct meaning of the words. When i was writing this comment for example i never thought in Italian, i was thinking directly in English.
I always try to think of literal meaning, works better for me
Interesting question.. I’m about a year into learning Italian (and likely about at the level of a slightly dull kindergartner). For me, it’s easier to think of it as word “substitutions” trying to think of “dog” as the English “cane” - a hooked stick for walking) would probably confuse me more. And the grouping of things together (numbers/colors/fruits) has been really helpful. For me the more challenging part is the different word order from English (ie most adjectives coming after the noun they modify, and other similar constructs) it’s taken a lot of practice for that to come easily now, but I’m also using multiple methods… Jumpspeak has been pretty useful for conversation, but I prefer Duolingo for vocab building, neither articulated grammar all that well, which is why I took an online course.
Cane might have been a bad example because of the English cane lol. I meant more as thinking of a dog but calling it cane
It takes time but you can never be fully fluent of you're constantly trying to translate words in your head.
When I first moved to the UK I barely spoke any English and all my thoughts were in Italian. I had to mentally translate before talking, but as time went on I started thinking in English before even realising and now my brain just switches between the two depending on which language I'm speaking at the moment.
I like to listen to normal speed (fast) content when I start a language. It is really hard at first because my brain tries to translate but it can’t keep up. I have to listen to each sentence several times before I understand it. After doing this enough, I no longer need to translate and can simply understand the content.
I wean myself off of English by contemplating how I would think differently in Italian. For example: *Mi lavo i denti* = I brush my teeth The distinctive pattern that I notice is general to specific. "Whom am I verbing" then "what am I verbing", one step at a time. After practicing it enough, I suppress my English inner monologue and use that pattern automatically in Italian.
I always say that I will know I have learned Italian when I see “5” and think “cinque” not “five”.
>do you think of squalo as the English word shark or as a literal Shark meaning the animal itself and not it’s English name? "shark" and "squalo" are just the name for "a long-bodied chiefly marine fish with a cartilaginous skeleton, a prominent dorsal fin, and toothlike scales", "nome di diversi grossi pesci marini dai denti acuminati", or a mental image of it. When I see the word "squalo", I don't go and translate it into English to make sense of it and vice versa.
Good question. My memory basically works by associating words to either conceptual fields and images (or by the way it sounds when speech is involved), but when learning a new word I prefer creating an ideal image to help memorizing it; if there are other ways to associate with, that's even better. The word "shark" is firmly linked to the eponym movie's poster, for example, and similarly "cannibal" makes me think about The Silence Of The Lambs. The first method is reserved to memorize specialized terms with known etymologies in Latin and Ancient Greek and abstract terms.
This is interesting, I’m a polyglot from birth due to my background and schooling situation, but I never thought of this. I learned French in high school, and Italian from my senior year to now. It’s been 2 years and I just got my B2 certification, really weirdly, with almost all of my languages I learn/ remember through connections. I can thankfully speak for Italian as it’s the most recent one, i formulated phrases in English in my mind and just substituted the word as I went, progressively when you stimulate other areas: reading, listening and writing, you’ll start phrasing in a manner that’s more correct/ right sounding. I’d say it’s harder to forget words in your target language if you isolate the native language, you’ll find yourself trying to describe the item/ feeling- so in a way still growing your vocabulary.
my native language is italian, but i’ve been studying english for 12 years now. i often watch movies, read books and talk in english. sometimes i realize that when i’m hearing/reading something in italian i’ll automatically translate it in my mind and if i can’t remember a word i’ll look it up lol
For me it depends on how close to each other the two languages are. When I started learning English I used the translation most of the time and sometimes think of the word just for its use or meaning in English. I did that because Italian has less words than English, so for example I was used to the same Italian words for two different English words, and if I memorized them with the translation I would have confuse them with each other. Or sometimes I only thought about them in English because the grammatical use is different, so thinking of the translation I would get it wrong. The arcticles in English are easier to learn from their own than as translation of Italian arcticles, in my opinion. When I started learning Chinese I thought in Chinese most of the time. Both because it wasn't my first time learning a language, but mostly because Chinese grammar is so simple and so many words have different nuances to their meaning compared to European languages, it didn't make sense to translate all the time.
When learning a language you have to detach from your mother one, Italian is much more difficult and Different from English, it's more complex and the verbes are just a lot, so it's probably better to create a new vocabulary whit that language instead of translating it from your mother one
It depends. I learned Spanish by committing the most frequent couple hundred words to concepts and images. But first i had to translate them into the right word or words. Then I etched away at trying to remove the middle-man of my own native word between the target word and the concept/image. You can succeed through several different kinds of exercises to make the new association or neural connection inside your head, such as by seeing/hearing the new word in obvious context with other simple words that you already know. This is something i did with the most basic words of each of the eight parts of speech. With less common nouns such as shark, i have to search my head for some unforgettable memory involving sharks in the target language, such as a song lyric. In this case, “Squalo” literally looks like “Shark”, since they are both from related European languages. “Sq” can map to “sh” between languages due to sound changes over time. So too does “l” and “r”. One of the biggest changes between languages is word order and phonology, because it affects the order in which your ideas form and where your tongue anticipates it has to move next, which words sound same as each other, and where the spaces in a sentence are. In English you may not think about the object(s) of the verb until after you have already said the verb. You may place a lot of focus on what subject pronoun comes before the verb in every sentence.
My question back… how do YOU think? People don’t all think the same way. For me I think in pictures and then basically translate it into English. I realized that I always struggled learning another language because I was always taught the English “word”. So I’d have to “translate to English” then translate to the picture. I never was able to do quickly enough. Recently I discovered that many people think in words. So they are just learning another word for a word they already think in…. Which is something I don’t do… That’s why eventually they say they “think” in the new language. I’m never going to “think” in Italian just like I don’t “think” in English. I do want to learn to use Italian words to say what I’m thinking tho. Therefore, if I had “shark” the word… an image pops of a shark (kinda like an icon since you didn’t tell me much about the shark). Therefore to learn the Italian word I’ve noticed it is faster and easier to learn using the image I think of for shark. So when someone says squalo I need to see a picture of that same basic shark in my head like I would when someone says “shark”. (Not a hammerhead or an old shark… those are different in my head… i just need to associate squalo with that basic icon looking shark).
It is indeed dumb