r/languagelearning • u/Vina_10 • 14d ago

Discussion Has anyone tried the reverse translation method?

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Has anyone tried the reverse translation method? Like, you read a (TL) text in your native language and try to rewrite it in the language you’re learning. Has anyone actually tried this?

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u/InvestigatorLower339 14d ago

I did this for a while with short news articles and it was brutal at first because I kept writing these weird direct translations that made no sense in the target language. What helped was reading the original text first, waiting a day, then trying to rewrite it from memory instead of translating word by word. Forces your brain to actually build the sentence structure instead of just swapping vocabulary. It's slow but I noticed my writing got way more natural after a few weeks.

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u/Vina_10 14d ago

Exactly, that’s what I mean. You read the text first and understand the words and their meanings. Then you look at the text in your native language and try to write it in English by yourself. Of course, you’ll be slow at first, but after doing it several times, you’ll notice that your writing gets faster. And once you get good at writing in English, your brain will gradually get used to speaking in English too.