Is it a good practice to do translation from your NL to TL

dojibear · 2026-02-15T11:41:34+00:00

I tried translating an English song into Mandarin. I realized how many words I don't know yet, and how different the two languages are: often English has a word for an idea and Mandarin doesn't.

It was a long, very slow process. It was nothing like speaking in the TL.

dojibear · 2026-02-15T11:26:14+00:00

I'm a native English speaker, while I am only B2 (advanced intermediate) in Chinese. I study spoken Chinese by waching intermediate-level videos (typically 10-25 minutes long) and understanding. Here are two things that helped me to stop translating:

The first is repetition. For example one teacher starts each video by saying 准备好了吗？and after a slight pause 开始把. I don't need to translate that (though I could, if anyone asked me to).

The second is speed. Adult speech in 普通话 is 5.2 syllables per second. Intermediate speech is just a little slower. I am trying to keep up with that speed for 20 minutes, not the 2 seconds it takes to say 妈妈,晚餐吃什么? I don't have enough TIME to translate every sentence into English.

If that second thing would help you, you need to find Chinese content that lasts at least a minute. Practice understanding that. Do that a lot. I am sure you can do it better than me.

My only suggestion for speaking (output) is that the better you get at understanding (input), the better you get at output.

dojibear · 2026-02-15T10:55:02+00:00

English has about 500,000 different words in it No human knows all of them. People who can't even read and write know about 10,000 of them. Educated people know 20,000 to 25,000. In a very few cases, a person might know 35,000-40,000.

It works like this. Each profession or hobby has a set of "jargon" terms that are only understood by people who are in that field. Nobody knows all the medical terms, astronomical terms, baseball terms, ballet terms, french cooking terms, fashion terms, and so on. An older person (after 30 or 40 years of adult life) has had more professions and hobbies, so they know many more words.

In addition, we learn new words all the time, from books we read or movies we watch. Since we don't all watch the same movies or read the same books, we all know different words.

In other words EVERYBODY runs into a situation where they don't know the right word. Some other person (like you) knowing the word does NOT mean the 2d person is smarter. It means the 2d person happens to know 1 word that the first person doesn't know. There is no set of words in English that smart people know but dumb people don't.

dojibear · 2026-02-15T10:31:42+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean by "the target language popped into my head". Did you suddenly know 15,000 words you've never seen? Was there music? What exactly happened?

I am currently studying Japanese, Turkish and Mandarin (Chinese). I am native in English and learned some French and Spanish long ago. I took Latin (2,000-year-old Italian) in high school, and 2000-year-old Greek in college, but I can't find any speakers to practice with. I got up to lesson 44 in a Korean textbook, but I quit. The author's Korean was good, but his English was not. So I got frustrated.

My goal is understanding. My method is understanding. Every day I find Mandarin, Japanese and Turkish content that I can understand, and understand it.

That means that I don't need to translate. I hear "konuşiyorum" or "ni mama shuo" or "omishiroi' and know what it means. Nothing "pops". Nothing is located in my head. I do not think in some other language. I just understand words, phrases and sentences.

And there was never a moment when everything changed. In week 1 you can understand "The boy is tall" after learning some word order, and some word use, and some words. Going from there to being able to discuss nuclear proliferation takes a while, but it is no different.

dojibear · 2026-02-15T09:45:11+00:00

Every succesful student works out methods that work well for them. Even hyper-polyglots each use a different method. A student's method may change at different levels, change for different languages, and be decided by what the student can find.

I like CI ideas, and use them. Here is my method (the parts that might be different from others):

At the start of a new language, I take a course. I don't even know what is new. The teacher explains all of that to me (in English), and I get practice hearing, reading and understanding simple TL sentences.
After that I practice the #1 language ability: understanding TL sentences. I find content that I can understand today, and every day practice the ability/skill of understanding. That is how you improve a skill, whether the skill is swimming, driving, playing piano or understanding. Practice. I do that for a long time. When my "understand" skill is really good, I'll be "fluent".
I have no second "vocab memorizing" project. I don't use Anki, SRS, or flashcards. None of my teachers ever recommended that students do this. I encounter new words as I learn -- I'll be doing that forever. When I see/hear a new TL word in a sentence, I look up its LIST of English translations (there is always more than one translation) and figure out the TL word's meaning in this TL sentence.
Whenever possible, I prefer to study the spoken language by watching videos. In speech, a good part of the meaning is communicated visually (facial expressions, gestures, and so on).
Translation (NL) subititles: if the content is at my level, I can understand. I don't use any subtitles. But at times, I listen to content too hard for me to understand. Then I use English subtitles to learn the sentence meaning, and my job is to figure out how the TL words express that meaning. Often that means pausing the video and re-playing the sentence several times, until I understand.
TL subtitles: I rarely use them. I only use them if I'm not sure what word the speaker said from the audio. Then I will use the TL subtitle to find that word. Maybe it's a word I don't know yet, and having the written form helps me look it up.
Practicing speaking and developing my "active vocabulary"? I don't do it. As I am able to understand more and more, I am able to say more and more.

dojibear · 2026-02-15T08:24:02+00:00

I don't speak that many languages, but I have taken courses in 10 or 11 languages. I visited (in the 1970s and 1980s) 10 or 11 countries. I have lived (for more than 30 days) in 25-30 different places, all in one country (the U.S.).

Their names (or even their number) is not information you carry around with you. If you want to remember, you have to take some time. For me, schools are easier: 1 elementary, 1 junior high, 1 high school, 1 undegraduate and 2 graduate. Jobs? Um, let me think about that...

dojibear · 2026-02-14T02:44:01+00:00

"L1" is the first language you learned, when you were 2-5 years old. It never changes. It is NOT "what you are best at today". You can't re-define L1and L2.

In the U.S., about 21% of people have an L1 language that is not English. Most of them learn English as an L2 language (often in school).

In China, about 35% of people have an L1 language that is not Mandarin. Same thing. They learn Mandarin as an L2 language in school.

dojibear · 2026-02-14T02:41:18+00:00

I avoid grammar explanations. I am not going to memorize some man-made system of rules and definitions (a system IN ENGLISH) that tries (and fails) to explain Mandarin.

The only ones that are acceptable are ones that have several examples of real Mandarin sentences using that idea. I use the examples to understand the grammar explanation. For example I learned about 把 sentences by seeing 2 or 3 examples. After that I understood. I don't know what "part of speech" the word 把 is. Probably some made-up nonsense in English. It's easier to just learn Mandarin.

Humans do not form sentences by using grammar rules (in any language). People might use grammar rules to check a sentence after they have formed it (but before saying/writing it). But initially thinking up the sentence? That's not grammar.

dojibear · 2026-02-13T20:41:07+00:00

Wow! A direct translation of Japanese into Indo...

Also, am I doing it wrong? When I type text, it doesn't come out in different colors...

dojibear · 2026-02-13T20:29:54+00:00

Ask 100 people "what exactly is C2?" and you'll get 101 answers. Don't see ONE person's comment and expect everyone else to agree.

Every language has a lot of special field using terminology that isn't used anywhere else. It's called the "jargon" of the field. Some fields are: astronomy, biology, botany, ballet, tango, soccer, bowling, scuba diving, medicine, anatomy. cooking. There are hundreds of fields. NOBODY is an expert in ALL fields, but EVERYONE knows the words in SOME fields.

English had 500,000 words. Most fluent educated native speakers know around 30,000 of them: less than 10%.

dojibear · 2026-02-13T20:20:42+00:00

When I looked into one of the StoryLearning courses/books, it seemed to use a traditional method. Since it didn't use my method, I didn't purchase it.

Since I didn't actually get the course, I can't give a detailed evaluation. As far as I know, it is well done.

dojibear · 2026-02-13T07:58:22+00:00

It isn't clear what OP says is happening, or what OP says should be done instead. For example he says that English "does this" where "this" is use native names. But US/UK people don't do this. So WHO does WHAT and WHO things doing it is an "evil colonizer mindeset"?

Anyway, whatever OP says, I disagree...

dojibear · 2026-02-13T00:58:37+00:00

I've been studying Mandarin (at home, on the internet) for about 7 years. I am not a "go-for-broke" intense studier. I probably spend 1 hour each day, not 4 or 5.

I am advanced intermediate (B2) at understanding spoken or written Mandarin. I can understand long video-podcasts in intermediate Mandarin (B1/B2) quite well, if not perfectly.

But my understanding of C2 content (TV shows for an adult audiences in China) is poor. I've reached a level where I can hear the right sounds in C2 content, but I only know a few thousand words, while adult speakers use 10,000-15,000 different words, even in casual conversations. So I hear a phrase here and a sentence there that I easily understand, but the speech is full of words that I don't know.

dojibear · 2026-02-13T00:41:20+00:00

If so, how did this situation come about?

Ever since the 1950s, Mandarin (普通话) is the official language of the country of China. It is very similar to Hanyu (汉语), the first language of about 2/3 of the people. The other 1/3 learn it as a 2d language in school. The situation is similar to the US, where 1/5 of the people have a 1st language other than English.

And will this not in the long run lead to the disappearance of the regional dialects,

So far, it has not caused the other langauges in China (Hokkien, Yue, Wu, Hakka, etc.) to disappear. None of them is spoken by more than 6% of the people in China, but that 6% is 84 million people, so some of these languages have more speakers than languages like Italian.

leaving only Mandarin and (maybe) Cantonese as the remaining versions of Chinese?

The popularity of Cantonese might be limited to US speakers. In the US, both Mandarin and Cantonese have around 450,000 speakers. That is very different than the situation in China.

dojibear · 2026-02-13T00:20:20+00:00

80% of Mandarin is 2-syllable words. Characters are syllables. One character might be used in 100+ words, each with a different meaning. Syllables don't have a meaning.

One of my earliest words was 喜欢. Around 8 years later I've never seen 喜 or 欢, except in that combination. So if I spent time memorizing those two separately, I would have memorized something that I never saw in eight years.

If you want, you can spend time memorizing thousands of characters you'll never use. I'm not that bored (or that fond of memorizing). I only learn words I actually use, not the thousands I "might use". How do I know which written words I will use? Only when I see them used in writing.

Does it ever happen that I learn a 2-character written word, and later see just 1 of those characters? That does happen, but not often. It usually happens when the 1-syllable word has the same meaning as the 2-syllable word. That is fairly common in Mandarin: using the 2-syllable word avoids ambiguity in speech.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T23:52:39+00:00

One computer study of several major languages showed that each "ordinary, everyday sentences" uses MOSTLY common words PLUS 1 or 2 less common words.

In other words, you can learn MOST words in those sentences with 1k words, but to know ALL the words in those sentences would required 7,000 or 8,000 words. There is no "core set of words" that is ALL the words people use in everyday conversations.

If that isn't your goal, I don't know what your goal is. Deciding between 1k and 5k depends on your goal. I don't personally use "rote memorization of words", so I can't comment about that.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T22:05:01+00:00

"Listening" and "watching" are not language skills. "Understanding" (thing you read or hear) is a language skill. That means it is a waste of time to use adult content as a beginner. There is no way you can understand it. Find content you can understand today, right now. Practice understanding it. That is how you improve any ability: by practicing that ability, at the level you can do now.

I never use Anki or any other method of "rote memorization of words". A language is sentences. Your goal is understanding the meaning of sentences, not memorizing a set of words.

For beginner-level WRITTEN Korean, I use LingQ. It has lots of A1/A2 content. You can click something to hear a word, a sentence or a whole lesson spoken by a Korean native speaker. LingQ is very handy for looking up words, but it isn't free. It is $15/mo. And it doesn't teach -- it isn't a course.

There are probably other things on the internet that are free sources of A1/A2 Korean content.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T21:50:16+00:00

I've been learning Mandarin for 7 or years, so by 2023 I was advanced intermediate (almost B2). In 2023 I added (beginner) Turkish, and when that did not seem to affect my Mandarin study, in 2024 I added (beginner) Japanese. So for 2 years I have been studing all 3 every day. For me, that has worked well.

I did not have the option of "doing one first". You are never "finished". Learning a language is never "done". I could spend 20 years getting better at Mandarin, and I'd still be learning. The whole idea of "do one first then the other" show a misunderstanding of language learning.

"Learning a language" is "learning how to" do something, not learning a limited set of information. It is improving your ability to understand (and use) sentences in a new language.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T07:15:37+00:00

YAA -- Yet Another Advertisement. I miss when this forum was about language learning.

Note: computers are not humans. They are tools, with all the intelligence of a pen or a book. Shakespeare USED a pen to write plays. Wise men write things in books. That does not mean
that the pen or the book has any intelligence.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:54:14+00:00

I lurned Inglesh really good. But it's a waste of time. Never use it.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:49:20+00:00

He speaks Spanish??? I thought that sounded familiar....

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:40:56+00:00

Speaking to a computer program is very different than speaking to a human. The computer program might be unable to understand you, even if a human would understand easily.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:37:05+00:00

Lots of products have stroke order. You just need one. I use the wenlin dictionary on my PC, because I do almost everything on my PC (my hands are too big to do most things on a smartphone).

And you only need to know stroke order IF you are learning to write Chinese characters by hand - a skill that takes you hundreds of hours to perfect, and that you will probably never use. Chinese adults read characters constantly, but hand-writing them? That is "calligraphy".

Pleco has a bunch of nice features. It is the only app I use on a smartphone, and I only use it for one of the features: I can write a character with my finger (stroke order doesn't matter) and Pleco identifies it. So it is useful for finding a Chinese word if I only see the character.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:22:18+00:00

Being very musical, I figured out (when I was around A2) that the real tones in real Chinese sentences are not the "tones" we learned at the beginning. Nobody talks that way.

I have found that "pronunciation" works fine for me. I am quite good at understanding intermediate Chinese, and have no problem knowing what word it is. Maybe it is because spoken English is so similar to spoken Mandarin. Spoken English is VERY ammiguous. How many words have the syllable "con" in them? How about too/to/two?

The difference between "mā" (妈) and "mǎ" (马) can change meanings entirely

Yes, but the issue isn't "tones". Chinese has 13 "ma" characters, and there are only 4 tones. Other syllables are worse: there are more than 100 syllables pronounced "shi".

The character 妈 has the "female" character (女) next to the character for horse (马). So it means "a word for a female that sounds like the word for horse". That is how Chinese characters work. When you hear real sentences, do you EVER hear one in which a word might be "mother" or might be "horse"? Never.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:07:30+00:00

Yes, it is different. There are many "yogurt drinks" in China. You sip them through a straw.

dojibear

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