Thinking in your target language | General discussion | Forum

Agreed with above about the translating. 

I'm not fluent in Spanish, though I am advanced and currently live in Spain, and I think in Spanish whenever using the language (prior to coming to Spain, my formal education was in high school, so I couldn't tell you when I first started to really think in it).  If I'm alone with my thoughts, I switch to Spanish if I'm thinking of a conversation I want to have.  My French is very basic right now, but when speaking my mind is in "foreign language mode" so I aim to think in just French, but honestly either French or Spanish comes out of my mouth.

JWood424 said:

I have been practicing Spanish pretty intensely for the last several years and I still find my brain wants to fight me when it comes to thinking in Spanish.  I think your brain's natural tendency is to think in your native language.  (Although if you think about it, how much of our thoughts are actual words?)  I make a conscious effort to think in Spanish words when I am doing things around my house, such as making dinner or washing the dishes.  It's a bit of a mental workout, but it helps me remember vocabulary and verbs and I think it is a good exercise.  I don't think you are going to wake up one day and find you are thinking in Spanish instead of English, rather it is something that will happen slowly the more you use the language.  Obviously, the more you surround yourself with Spanish, the easier it becomes.  For example, when I speak to my co-workers in Spanish, my thoughts are all in Spanish, however as soon as I return to speaking amongst my English speaking co-workers, my brain slips back into English.  It will be harder if you are not constantly surrounded by it, but not impossible.  Good luck.

I really like this answer and would like to add one little thing to it: Thinking in one language while speaking another is not really a good idea. It leads to mental confusion, headaches, weird accents, and weird grammar coming out of your mouth. At least for me.

@Randybvain: I think you miss-understood me. Everybody starts translating until they become minimally familiar with specific grammar constructs. But he's been at it for 4 months, which means that he should know quite some grammar "by heart" now, and thus should not need to mentally translate all that much.

As an interesting example, my mother doesn't really speak English, but she can translate it back to Spanish and then interpret it. She's been doing it for over 20 years and trust me, she can't speak a word of it, nor read it all that fast since she has to go through the translation step. She recently started an English course and she is constantly telling me that now she's actually starting to read English rather than translating it back to Spanish, and that the difference is outstanding both in speed, and comprehension.

As for the mixing languages mentally I'm speaking from experience in the sense that if I'm, say, speaking to some English-speaking friends and I suddenly have to speak Spanish I'll be thinking in English and my Spanish will come out with an English accent, I'll have a hard time finding my words, and I'll need to actively think how to properly say what I want to say. The reverse is also true.

If I am to entirely switch between languages without being required to switch back 2 seconds later, I do this by changing the language I'm internally thinking in, and speech follows naturally without much effort on my part.

I do agree that I have certain default language for certain expressions, invariably of my active language. For instance, when I see a creepy old man hitting on some 17 years old I don't think "perv" so much as "viejo verde", and when I'm bored out of my mind I'm always "bored" rather than "aburrido". These don't seem to affect my speech in any way, though they very often act as a language switcher, assuming I'm by myself thinking about something in no particular language.

This topic reminds me of something I witnessed when my son was still a child.

Having played fantasy computer games and having watched the LotR films in his very imaginative age, he started speaking English when he wished to get into his own fantasy world. He would come to the kitchen, utter "Log in" and switch to English. Obviously I was supposed to speak it too and play along. (I still remember milk was 'white beer'.) Once he was ready to quit the play he would say "Log out" and switch back to our native language.  This way he sort of happened to learn some English very naturally. Learning more has been easy for him ever since.

I wonder if we adults could be a bit more imaginative with our language studies as well.