How to Stop Translating in Your Head

So for the last few days, I've been thinking about one question that a viewer asked last week. And it's the question, how do I stop translating in my head? Sometimes when you're learning a language like English, when you hear something or read something, the first thing you do is you try to translate it in your head, word for word, so that you can understand what you've read or what you've heard.

And this just isn't efficient, it takes so much time to translate. And if you're having a conversation, it can be kind of awkward because after someone says something to you in English, you pause for a bit while you translate in your head. So, in this English lesson, I'm going to look at a few different ideas and techniques.

I'm going to look at a few things that you can do to stop translating in your head, when you hear English or when you read it. (upbeat music) One thing that I would recommend is that you do something called overloading. Overloading is when you do more than one thing at the same time, and when you're learning a language, it can be good to read while you're listening.

So, if you can find a book to read and if you can find the audio book, you can read the book while you're listening to it. What this does is it makes your brain very, very busy and you don't have time to stop and translate. You might not understand everything you're reading but that's okay for this activity.

The other thing it does is that you don't get to set the speed at which you are reading and listening to the English. As you play the audio, you're forced to go at the speed of the audio, so stopping feels like something that you're not able to do. So, overloading is a technique where you do two things at the same time, usually reading and listening and it just makes your brain really really busy and unable to stop and translate.

Again, you might not understand everything you're reading and hearing, but if you choose a book that's at the right level for where you're at in learning English, I think this technique will help you a lot. Another thing you can do to stop translating in your mind is to oversaturate part of your day with English, or do what I would call long listening. When you listen to a song, it's short and hopefully you're able to understand some of it, but when you listen to a podcast or when you listen to an audio book, it's usually a lot longer, it might be an hour or an hour and a half.

When you do long listening, your brain gets a little bit tired and you might forget at some point to actively translate in your mind. If what you're listening to is at or close to your level of what you can understand, eventually your brain will just quietly stop translating, and you'll sort of understand what's happening. I can remember the first time this happened to me, I'm a French learner, and one time I was watching a French TV show, a number of years ago, and all of a sudden I realized that 10 minutes had gone by and I had understood most of what had happened and I hadn't translated anything in my mind.

So, another thing you can try is to oversaturate part of your day, or do some long listening, do something like that where at some point, you kind of forget that you're listening to English and your brain might automatically start to just understand what you're hearing. Another technique to stop translating in your mind is called forced description, or as I like to call it, talking to yourself. This is when you sit somewhere, like on a park bench, or maybe just sit at a mall or at a restaurant, and you describe what you're seeing either in your mind quietly or out loud, if you're comfortable doing that.

And you force yourself to only use words you know, so you look around you and if you see a man with a dog, you say, I see a man with a dog. If you see a man with some other kind of animal and you don't know the name of it, you just don't describe that thing. So, what you're doing is you're forcing yourself to use the words you already know, so memorizing a lot of vocabulary is obviously a good idea as well, but don't try to describe things, if you don't know the words.

This forces you to use the words you know, to think in English, and to not translate at all while you're describing your surroundings. Another really cool technique that you can use is something called shadowing. This is where you watch a video or listen to something, and after the person says something, you hit pause and you say it yourself out loud.

This is mostly meant to help you practice your pronunciation. But it has an interesting side effect as well, because you're listening to English and then saying it out loud immediately, and then hitting play and listening and then pause and saying it out loud, you actually stop translating in your mind while you're doing it. Because you're focusing on listening and pronunciation, you forget to translate.

So again, you might not 100% understand everything the person is saying, you might only understand 70 or 80% of it, but because you're busy listening and speaking, you forget to translate while you're doing it, which is a good thing. So I just mentioned that knowing a lot of vocabulary is a good idea, there's a technique though that you can use while learning vocabulary which will help you to stop translating in your mind, and it's called visualization. When you learn a new word in English, if you are able to try to picture the meaning of that word in your mind, instead of learning the equivalent word in your own language.

This is a very powerful technique, it helps you to distance yourself from your own language, and it helps you to start thinking in English. So, if you learn a new word like dump truck, try to picture a dump truck in your mind, or look up a picture of a dump truck on the internet, or even draw a little picture of a dump truck. When you memorize the word in English and then the word in your own language, you're almost forcing yourself to translate in your mind whenever you hear that word.

But if you can learn words and if you are able to visualize the meaning, it will help you to stop translating in your mind. As soon as you possibly can on your English learning journey, you should get an English only dictionary. A dictionary where you can find the word in English and the definition, and if you don't have an actual dictionary, use an online dictionary that is English only.

When you first start learning a language, it's nice to have a French English dictionary, or a Japanese English dictionary, they're very helpful because you can look up what a word means in your own language, but they are actually not a good idea once you've reached a certain level, because when you do that, you're actually training your brain to translate all the time. So, as soon as you possibly can, get an English only dictionary, or if you don't wanna buy an actual dictionary, there are plenty of English only dictionaries online, start using that as soon as you possibly can in your English learning journey. So, you might be thinking to yourself if you've been watching my video lessons for a while that, I've said all these things before and you would be correct.

I've said most of what I've said in this video, in other videos, but I'm saying it again because repetition, doing things over and over again or hearing things over and over again, is part of the learning process. It's just kind of how humans work. It would be awesome, if you could just know something after reading it once or hearing it once, but it doesn't always work that way.

So, repetition is one of the last recommendations I'm going to give you. In order to stop translating in your mind, if you reread things, or if you listen to something over and over again, eventually your brain stops actively translating it. Eventually you'll understand what you're hearing without your brain needing to convert it into your own language, so do that.

If you can reread something, if you can listen to something over and over again, do it, add repetition into your learning. Hey, thanks so much for watching this little English lesson about how to stop translating in your mind when you're reading English or listening to English, I hope it helped you a little bit. Once again, if this is your first time here, don't forget to click that subscribe button and give me a thumbs up if this video helped you learn a little bit of English.

And if you have the time and you don't know what to do next, why don't you stick around and watch another English lesson.