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You can go meta with your language skills by equipping yourself with the necessary speaking tools. This might be with teachers and peers, but also when using text books and grammars written for a non-native audience.įortunately, squashing this bug is an easy win. The native language trap is set when we talk about features of the target language, too. For a kinaesthetic learner, these could offer very flexible support techniques to couple all sorts of grammatical features in a spoken language with a non-verbal memory cue. Fully-fledged sign languages have highly complex systems for expressing concepts like tense.
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Of course, you could also make this signing official. The hope is that future retrieval of the word comes from a non-verbal representation, rather than an English translation. For ‘rest’, I smooth out a flat surface before my body, as if preparing a bed to lie on, or painting a calm sea. ‘Get’, for example, is a movement of the hands towards the body. Some signs are easier than others, but since they are purely personal cues, they can be as obtuse as you like. I start by forming the shape of the idea or concept with my hands as I say the target word out loud. Why not, in that case, enlist that trait in the battle to ‘de-English’ my foreign languages? My hands have a communicative mind of their own, and like to form shapes of their own accord along with the sounds that come out of my mouth. I can be a bit of a ‘hand talker’ in any case, as a visual thinker. Well, one way I have explored recently is through physical signing – a kind of personal sign language. But beyond that point, its activities rely only upon the image, not the English translation.Ĭan we integrate that kind of non-verbal representation into our independent learning? Helping hands
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For instance, when Drops presents a new term, the translation is flashed up briefly with the pictogram to avoid misinterpretation. Some apps adopt an approach that minimises this reliance upon the native language. No wonder it slows us down in higher-level speaking. If we see words as abstract symbols representing real-world concepts, then the translation method simply adds a second level of abstraction. One route to weakening the native-hook reliance is to mimic how children acquire language: to tie new language directly to mental representations of the real world. Is there a better way to run, once we have learnt to walk? Minimising abstractions The only snag is, I still manipulate them quite clumsily and unnaturally in conversation, thanks to that translation bias. I learnt masses of vocabulary and grammar from an ancient copy of Teach Yourself Polish. As such, even those old translation-based courses have their uses. For one thing, we need something to hook new words and phrases onto when we learn them. It remains a rational starting point for the absolute beginner. Similarly, the Assimil courses, based on side-by-side bilingual dialogues, continue to be incredibly popular. Take Luca Lampariello’s bidirectional translation technique, for instance. Some very successful polyglots have achieved stunning results with translation. If you have ever leafed through some old Teach Yourself volumes, for example, it was once the only way anybody ever considered learning or teaching a language.Īnd it has its success stories. Translation has its place, of course, and not only because of its very long pedigree as the classical language learning method of choice. Even the setup of our beloved Anki assumes a one-to-one relationship between the new words you learn and some native matching pair. Duolingo, Memrise, Glossika and many, many others default to translation exercises for drilling vocabulary. Just look at the most popular e-learning tools. The problem is, we are constantly nudged to think of languages in terms of equivalencies.
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But reaching that point, where Mentalese, the non-verbal code of thinking, bypasses your first tongue and goes straight to the target one, can seem a far-off ideal. Independence from translation is one of the super-skills of fluent foreign language use. The inefficiency of it all is so frustrating. In those early stages, what we want to say often pops up in our native language first then, we try to translate it into the target language on the fly. You are probably familiar with the scenario – that slow, faltering, stoppy-starty feel to conversation in a language you are learning.
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I was on a mission this week: to minimise the interference of English translation in my language learning.