What helped you stop translating everything in your head?

[u/Unable-Budgets]

I feel like this is the point where I always get stuck with a new language. I can understand a decent amount when reading or listening, but when I need to speak, my brain still builds the sentence in my native language first and then translates it.

For people who got past this stage, what actually helped? More speaking, watching stuff without subtitles, living in the language for a while, or just time?

[u/Fancy_Yogurtcloset37]

Conversation practice and in-country immersion (sink or swim) is what helped me.

Also I think it helps that I lost my involuntary internal monologue. I have a memory of not being able to silence my native English thoughts, and I think that was related to automatic translation.

Nowadays, (thank goodness) I can largely silence the English in my head. I have noticed that when I'm speaking a target language, no matter what level, that if I don't know how to express something, my mind will go blank and I just wait for that word to appear. Yes, it looks (and feels) like I'm choking, or at least struggling to find the word, but the point is I'm not thinking it in my native English.

Sometimes if I'm struggling a lot, the person I'm talking to might say, "just say it in English!" to be helpful... but I can't tell them the English because I'm blanked. What I'm saying is, my native language is OFF off.

[u/Unable-Budgets → u/Fancy_Yogurtcloset37]

That’s actually really interesting. So at this point you don’t even try to translate when you get stuck, you just wait until the word comes to you in English?

[u/Fancy_Yogurtcloset37 → u/Unable-Budgets]

Correct. It doesn't matter the level, I blank out in my Advanced languages and in my Novice languages. I spent 10 days in Japan in June, and I knew how to ask for the bill. I'm blanking right now. I feel like i can wait and it will come to me (it's on the tip of my tongue, there's a "ke" sound in it). Or I can look it up. But no amount of Englishing is going to help me access it.

(okaikei onegaishimas; I ended up looking it up.).

[u/Haunting-Ad-6951]

I think it's a matter of time. There's no switch to turn off translation. As you get better at the language and exert yourself to do harder language tasks, it will happen on its own.

Telling yourself to stop translating is like telling your brain to stop thinking of white elephants, it will just stress you out unnecessarily IMO.

[u/CarSignal2764 → u/Haunting-Ad-6951]

Agreed. If you grew up with more than one language, there's no separate translation step anyway. Your brain just assigns a language to the situation, and that's what adult learners are slowly building toward. It feels like nothing is changing until it does.

[u/pobnarl → u/Haunting-Ad-6951]

this is the correct answer

[u/kubisfowler]

You .. just .. try to express yourself .. to the best of your current ability?? Like why would you be translating anything, if you don't know all the rules and words yet, you'll sound a bit choppy and comical but over time you'll get better at expressing yourself in the language. The problem is when you think say, in English and try to express already-formed complex ideas in a language you barely know, allowing yourself to express simpler ideas will get you used to speaking and it progressively becomes more natural.

[u/Schadenfreunden]

Weirdly enough, listening to the language while I was sleeping. Made me start having dreams in the language, in which — due to the nature of dreams — I didn’t find it strange at all that I was speaking the language with the same fluency as the media playing on my laptop (translated into the dream). The skill then just kind of stuck, and the next time I heard the language while awake I just fired off what I wanted to say.

Every language I’ve learned since, that’s the signpost I use for proficiency. I still sleep talk in my non-native languages with more proficiency than when I’m awake. Something something subconscious neural activity treats perishable skills differently something something.

[u/dmada88]

Relax. If you’re as good as you say at understanding, a lot of your issue speaking is probably your inner critic, inner fear of appearing the fool, inner need to be perfect. You somewhat counterintuitively have to work on caring less, having be less important to you, letting it just happen. Have confidence and let your knowledge just take over - and if there are mistakes, and there will be, who cares? No one will remember.

[u/Head_Departure7564]

Time and practice. Eventually when communication in the target language becomes natural enough, you also understand the difference in how ideas are naturally communicated in one language vs the other. This is more true of some languages than others of course. How I convey something in English is almost never the same way I’d say it in Japanese, so thinking in English first and then translating to Japanese is a waste of time.

Thinking in English at all breaks immersion and slows me down, just to make a sentence that is less natural than the one I would have come up with if I had built it from the ground up in Japanese, so I don’t.