Almost every language teacher will say that "translating" is the wrong way to go about learning a foreign language. By that I mean thinking "I eat ice cream" and then translating word by word into another language.
My personal experience says we always translate*. When you are first learning, you translate word by word. As you progress, you translate phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, and eventually whole ideas at a time. And I find that the "chunk-size" of your translation varys depending on how familiar you are with the subject matter. If I read technical or formal documents in my target language, I find myself translating much more than if I'm gossiping about people--an area where I have lots of experience :-)
* Ok, maybe not kids, but that is another discussion.
The best way to learn a second language is to be a little kid. Kids don't worry about grammar rules.
ReplyDeleteIf it's too late for that, the second option is to translate. We have to relate the new words or phrases to something we already know. Of course there are some words and phrases which cannot be literally translated, such as gaman (Japanese) and hati (Okinawan).