Don't Translate! Learn Language with Comprehensible Input

don't translate hello and welcome welcome to input English this episode is called Don't translate it's important don't translate there are several reasons you don't want to approach your learning the English language translating it will betray you it will sink your ship you don't want to do this here's why first of all English is not your language with a bunch of different words no it's not the same each language is a system of communicating thoughts desires impression information instructions Between Two Brains it's actually what humans have dreamt about about for years I wish I could communicate

my thoughts to that person or I wish I could travel in time I wish I could know what soand so was thinking well if they wrote it down they told you so languages allow us a form of time travel because the Thoughts From the Past are communicated to us in the present by literature so each language is a system for transferring thoughts from one brain to another and in order to use each language you have to know the language not just the words if you substitute word for word translating between languages you'll make huge mistakes

you will not understand the other people and they will not understand you so for that reason alone don't translate there are more reasons next you don't have time to translate if every sentence coming into you gets translated word for word to your native language while you're doing the translation the conversation has moved on you'll never keep up and if you're trying to translate English into your language real time what you will see is that English speakers speak way too fast the only way around that is to learn English as a language not as a translation

drill if you're doing it with translation you'll never be able to translate quickly enough to understand people if you're translating between your language and English you'll never be able to find the words and the grammar in order to speak with confidence you're starting to get the message there are a lot of reasons for not trying to translate between these languages the next reason to not translate between English and your native language is the subtlety of each language each word has a meaning but almost always more than one meaning and the meaning that we understand that

a word has depends entirely on the context so if you memorize the equivalent word between your language and English then your understanding of the English language will be so superficial that it won't be useful to you when you learn language with comprehensible input you hear each word in context and you get used to that context and so you start to develop a mental image of all the relationships that that word has to the rest of the world you don't want isolated words that are only connected because they're associated with a single word in your original

language no you want a robust understanding of the words and the only way to get that is context when we say comprehensible input what we're talking about is learning languages in context another reason to not translate is translating word for word makes it tempting to start memorizing lists of words and memorizing isolated words is not a way to learn a language it just doesn't work now how do I know that because I did it I did it I did it decades ago and it didn't work I've said many times before in these videos that in

high school I learned a lot of words and I learned a lot of grammar rules when we were learning German in high school it was a whole lot of translation one word to another one word to another and when I tried to buy groceries in Austria I could list a whole bunch of words or I could conjugate a verb but the people in the store were not interested in hearing a list of words from me and they were certainly not interested in my views on verb conjugation they were wanted to know what I wanted to

buy and I couldn't tell them because my language learning in high school was built primarily on translation memorizing lists of words and learning grammar rules so to summarize don't do it don't do it it's a betrayal it's a trap when we are in school we are taught to acquire Language by memorization studying the dates of wars and the names of kings and queens and the names of countries and capitals and major cities we're we are schooled that way and the reason that education tends to do that is it's easy to measure it's easy to measure

a child's progress if you can measure the the information that he or she has committed to memory the problem is languages don't work that way and so if you try to memorize a bunch of words and then use translation between English and your language it's just not going to work that's the end of this episode I hope you enjoyed these thoughts on language learning I invite your comments below and I hope you join us in future videos see you soon [Music]