How To Stop Translating In Your Head

Having to translate back and forth between your target language and your native language is one of the most frustrating things for new learners.

This whole process can really slow everything down and can make speaking and listening especially difficult.

The good news is that you will not be doing this forever …I will go through some ways you can stop translating in your head, but I will warn you now, this will only work if you put the effort in and try to improve.

Why Do We Translate Our New Language Back Into Our Native Language?

The simple reason that we translate our new language back into our native language first is because we are not comfortable with the new language yet.

Our brain sees the words in the new language and recognises them and while we might understand, our ability is not strong enough to do this automatically.

Think about your native language, you only need to glance at a word, or half hear something and you will understand it. Your brain is so use to the language it can subconsciously see straight through spelling mistakes or mispronunciations without you even releasing. We are very, very comfortable with your native languages. 

In comparison our brains are just not that comfortable with our new language yet and we will always translate things to something we are more comfortable with, which by default means back to our native language to help us work out what is happening.   

We are sort of using our native language as a safety net to help us process the new language.

Translating Into Your Native Language Is Fine At The Start

You will often hear people saying you need to stop translating your new language back into your native language as early as possible, while this would be good, it’s probably not possible.

As I’ve said, your brain is not used to the new language yet, it isn’t comfortable. You can’t force it to be something it is not. It’s a subconscious process; you can’t force yourself to not do this.

If you need to translate in your head, then do it. I know it’s slow and I know it’s annoying, but it’s all a part of the language learning process. Eventually you will get comfortable enough with the new language and will stop doing it.

Trust the process and you will be fine. If you’re doing it now, that’s okay, you will eventually stop so long as you keep trying to improve your overall ability.

How To Get Comfortable With Your New Language, So That You Stop Translating In Your Head?

If you want to stop translating in your head you need to be comfortable with the new language you are learning and the quickest and easiest way to get comfortable is to massively increase your language input.

Simply put, you need more reading and listening. The more you see and hear a word, the more it will start to just become a word you just know automatically.

If you don’t believe me, look back at your notes from the words you learned on your first day with your new language. It’s probably simple greetings and words like “I” or “hello”

Think about how you don’t need to translate these words anymore. You just know them as words that happen to be in a different language.

Now think about how many times you’ve seen or heard those word since you started. Probably thousands of times already?

You have seen them so many times that they are now just words you know. Your brain almost sees them as if they where words in your native language and recognises them automatically (but our brains are clever and can keep the two languages separate).

These first words you learned are probably automatic now. You didn’t even need to think about having to do this; your brain has just subconsciously made these words automatic as it is very comfortable with them. This is exactly what we need to do for the rest of the words in the language.

Imagine you did this with a 1000 words, pretty much anything any one says to you will just make sense. It will be a language you hear and understand, there is no extra thinking or translating involved.

Increase Your Exposure To The New Langauge

To get comfortable with a new language we need to increase our reading and listening activities, which will give us more exposure to the language.

We will see the same words, verbs, conjugations and phrases coming up over and over and they will eventually just become recognised and understood automatically by our brains, they will just become second nature to you.

At this point you will then stop having to translate them in your head back to your native language first.

This process of increasing your exposure is often called “immersion”. You can read more about – Learning A Language By Immersion

How Many Times Do You Need To See A Word To Make It Automatic ?

If you need to be exposed to words you are learning in a language multiple times to make them just become common knowledge in your brain, then how many times do we need to see these words for this to happen?

Unfortunately that’s not an easy question to answer. Every language is different, every word is different and every person learning them is also different.

Maybe you see a word 100 times and I have to see the same word 10,000 times. Who knows?

It doesn’t really matter; if you even try to count you will spend more time counting than actually learning words. Focus on getting more exposure to your new language and you will start to notice you are translating less and less.

Becoming Automatic Is A Slow Process

The other issue is that this process is slow and gradual. You probably won’t even notice it happening. Words you are translating today will at some point stop being translated in your head. You will not really notice that they have become automatic.

You will also find that in a few months you may still be translating, but it will be a totally different set of words you are translating. These might be words you have only recently learned and are not comfortable with yet.

This just shows you are making progress with your language learning. Just keep going, every day more and more words are getting closer to being automatic.

You Will Eventually Stop Translating In Your Head

At some point you will be comfortable enough with the majority of the words in the new language and you will hardly need to do any translating back to your native language, maybe just a few tricky words or new ones you have just learned.  

At this point you will feel like you are translating far less, as you know most of the words in the language now. This is really not an overnight thing and you may not even notice it has happened, but it will happen at some point.

How long it takes is also very subjective there are far too many factors to even guess how long this might take.

It really comes down to the more effort you put in now, the quicker you will get the results. Just keep reading and listening to as much as you can and eventually it will start to happen.

Trust the process and put in the effort, it will happen.

(You can read more about – How To Build A Language Learning Habit)

Conclusion

To stop translating your new language in your head, you need to stop worrying about translating in your head.

Focus on increasing your reading and listening skills you will start to make progress. As you become more comfortable with what you know you will automatically start translating less and less. Its pretty unconscious, so you shouldn’t worry about it.

If you are still translating now, just keep doing it, it’s not a bad thing. You are just still getting used to the language. With time you will be comfortable enough to stop. 

This whole process is often linked to “thinking in the Language” which you can read more about – How To Think In Another Language