In English, we use the idiom “take things at face value,” which means to understand something based on how it’s presented. In language learning, this approach can be incredibly powerful.
If I take things at face value in this context, I accept that a book in Xhosa is an incwadi; a bar of soap in Albanian is a copë sapuni; a bucket in Hmong is a thoob.
I just see an object, record its name in the language I’m learning, repeat it in my mind and move on. If I’m smart, I don’t make the biggest mistake you can make when learning another language.
What’s that, you ask?
Well, to answer that question, let’s start at the beginning…
Your first language, or mother tongue as we call it, wires your brain up for how you see the world. The more languages you speak the more elastic your brain. The more elastic your brain, the easier you can learn and play around with new information.
Learning a new language expands your worldview, creating space for new ideas and experiences. But here’s the question: Does an open mind make language learning easier, or does learning a new language make your mind more open?
People who only speak one language and filter their entire external experience through that language, limit their experience of the world. For instance, knowing that a table can be a masa (Turkish), a laulau (Samoan), or a borð (Islandic) teaches you that the world is not just one way, in fact it is hundreds of different ways depending on the language you speak.
Conversely, knowing that the English table is taulukko in Finnish, tabili in Yoruba, and tebul in Bhodjpuri or masa in Turkish, a maza in Swahili and a mesa in Filipino makes the world feel like an accessible, interconnected place.
People who have an open mind and willingness to suspend reality tend to learn languages faster than those who have a ridged way of thinking. I have meet tons of very intelligent, educated individuals who struggle to learn English. I can always identify them because they tend to share the same habit. They translate.
I know. I hear your confusion. I just rattled off different translated words for table. If we didn’t translate, how would we know what was what in our new target language?
To answer that question, let’s go back further still. When you were a baby and starting to learn a language, you didn’t have any other language. What did you do then? Simple. You simply accepted that your mother would bring out a mysterious thing at a certain time of day, hold it while pointing at images and saying different words, before you would magically fall asleep. She called it a book and you gave it that much meaning.
See, babies are not giving things names, they are giving them meaning. You know what a mobile phone is. You don’t roll over in bed grab your mobile phone, look at it and say ‘mobile phone’ aloud. No, you grab your mobile phone and know what it is and what it is used for because you give it a meaning, not a name.
Language learners who give concepts meaning and accept new names for them without having to position and reinforce the name they already know in their native languages do better at bilingualism.
I have tons of anecdotal evidence to back up my observation and subsequent belief in the fact that learners who translate into their mother tongue struggle to learn a new language, but does the evidence support this?
In fact, there are quite a few studies that describe this phenomenon and there’s an actual name for it. “Translation-based learning” is the practice of translating from the language you’re learning to your own language. Studies have shown that translation-based learning can hinder fluency and add unnecessary cognitive load (Robinson, 2003). It reinforces native language structures, making it harder to adapt to new patterns (Ellis, 1994; Lightbown & Spada, 2013). Further, methods that encourage using the target language actively, rather than relying on translation, lead to more natural language acquisition (Ellis & Shintani, 2014).
The evidence is clear, translation is not a good language learning strategy. That’s why many expert language learners, including myself, suggest walking around your house looking at things and saying their names out loud in English. This helps bypass your native language’s automatic responses and fosters a more direct connection with the new language.
Its not easy for children and especially for adults who have decades of linguistic programming behind them, to relearn the world as a place with totally different names but it’s definitely possible.
A good place to start is by fighting our instinct to translate and instead take things at face value in the target language we are trying to learn.
As a parent, you play a crucial role in helping your child succeed in learning English. Here are five simple ways to support them:
