We've talked about using your mouth in a new way. We've also described how you're likely to encounter familiar letters of the alphabet used in quite new ways. Now we're going to talk about thinking in a new way. This process is almost like going back to childhood once again; learning to associate sounds with objects the way you did when you were very young.
When you were a child, you didn't know what a tree was at first. Somebody had to tell you. Chances are your parents took you outside, pointed to a tree and said, “Tree!” I doubt that you even learned this word right away. Your parents probably had to repeat the word to you on several different occasions before you finally got the hang of it. You had to learn to associate the sound of the word “tree” with the big green leafy thing you saw in front of you.
That's what you must learn to do again. Only this time, since you're grown up, you will be able to get the hang of it much faster. You'll know why somebody is pointing to a tree, or to a picture of a tree, and saying a strange word. But you'll still have to learn the new word. You may even have to relearn it many times before you finally actually learn it.
There's an important idea here. Everybody in the world knows what that big green leafy thing is. We've all seen them hundreds and thousands of times. In America our name for that thing is “tree.” But in Germany the name for that thing is “Baum.” In Arab countries the name is “shajra.” And in China they say “shu.” These various words are not themselves “trees”. They are just some of the many hundreds of different sounds used in the world to represent that great big green leafy thing.
To learn a foreign language you must get away from the idea of translating words. Translating takes too much time and mental energy. You will never learn to really speak and understand a foreign language if you have to translate everything.
Instead, learn to associate the new sound directly with the image in your mind. When we hear the sound “tree” in English, we immediately associate it with that big green leafy thing. So when we hear the sound “Baum” or “shajra” or “shu”, we don't want to think, “Hmmmm. Baum means tree, which means that great big green leafy thing.” Doing that is translating. We want to learn to hear the sounds “Baum” or “shajra” or “shu” and immediately think, “Hmmm. That sound means that big green leafy thing.”
You need to establish new thought patterns by linking over and over again a series of sounds with a mental image or an idea of an action—just as the Frenchman, Nigerian or Korean does when he hears a sound in his language which represents an object or an action. After a while the once meaningless sound becomes the new reality and image in your mind.
Don't think that the challenge of new thinking will be limited merely to the area of new words; it is going to go much deeper than that. You will be learning new paths through the woods of the mind. You can pretty well say in any other language anything that you might want to say in English. It's just that the way of putting it will be different—depending on the language.
Let's use a different analogy: you can build a house using materials of very different sizes and shapes. English uses one set of building blocks, but other languages will use different-shaped building blocks that take some creativity to put together at first. Where we use two blocks, they may use three smaller ones—or maybe one large one.
Here's an example of an English sentence: We have to buy a few books before going home. When translating into almost any foreign language you will not take each English word and substitute a foreign word for it. You will instead be substituting groups of words or ideas from one language to the other. How each language will choose to group the ideas depends on the language.
In French or Spanish, for example, we have to buy is broken down into three words: we/have to/buy. Why? Because have to is another English form of saying must. So we shouldn't translate each word have and to but rather the idea of having to, which in a large number of languages is expressed in one word—like must.
In Turkish, however, the Turks are able to telescope all these four words into one word, as a peculiarity of Turkish grammar. So in Turkish you would be sensitive to packaging all of those particular words into one form. We'll talk more about grammar in later chapters. To continue with our example:
-A few is an English idomatic expression that in most languages is expressed in one word. So you learn the foreign word for a few.
-Before going home requires a little thought. In many languages like French or Russian before going requires three or even four words to express, given the way the grammar of those languages are. And in most languages home cannot be translated by one word. In this sentence home really means (to) home and many other languages will require that those two words be used to express it. Remember, we're not translating words but ideas.
This may seem confusing at the moment. After all, how am I to know how the other language expresses these ideas? Well, you won't know until you start to study your particular language. Each has its own time-honored peculiar way of putting things that has been worked out independently over hundreds of years or longer. Your own language course will alert you to those particular features.
-The only thing I can do for you here is to alert you to the nature of the challenge. Any given sentence in this book will be chopped apart differently when it gets translated into another language. Learn to start thinking in terms of bundles of concepts or ideas that will be converted to the new language and not single words.
Some of this may sound like philosophy or a complicated way to say simple things. But it really isn't. What you're trying to do is to think in a foreign language. Not to translate. If you don't learn to think in the foreign language, the chances are that you'll never really be very good at it.
Learning to think in a foreign language isn't all that hard. You learn to think in the language simply by using the language over and over again, asking and answering simple questions at even the simplest level until you feel comfortable with the process. Then you add some new words, and a few more new situations, and practice using them together with all the words you learned in previous lessons. Bit by bit you build up skill.
I don't want to suggest that you should never translate. There will be many times in class when the teacher will call upon you to translate a sentence that you hear or read. The point of this is to make sure that you really understand what the sentence means and that the grammar is clear to you. Sometimes when you meet an especially complicated sentence you may want to translate it to yourself, just to work it all out. But in the end you will want to go back and ensure that you can understand what it means simply by hearing it.
Once you really get into the language, you'll understand all this a good deal better. Somebody will be saying something quite fast and you'll suddenly realize that you understood it all! It's a great moment. Really satisfying. You probably wouldn't be able to repeat the words, or even know how it was that you understood it all. But it's a sign that the language is starting to sink into your mind. You're beginning to understand without translating.
In fact, serious professional translating is a very different art from speaking or understanding a language. Some people are very good at speaking, but have trouble translating well for someone else. Don't worry about this. You're trying to learn the language, not to become a translator—at least at this stage.
1. You can never really learn to speak a foreign language, or understand it when it is spoken, unless you can learn to think in the language. You can actually start to think in the language from virtually the first day.
2. Learning to think in a new language means learning to associate an initially meaningless new sound with the idea or image of what it means. You practice to the point where the new sound takes on meaning for you.
3. Avoid translating, that is, mentally putting into English everything that you read or hear. Your goal is to understand without translating.