THOUGHTS ABOUT LANGUAGE LEARNING
I've noticed that of the four catagories of communication through language I engage in (reading, writing, speaking, and understanding what is being said) speaking is the most difficult, and I think the primary reason for this (besides things like performance anxiety) is that its the medium in which I'm most often tempted to mentally translate from english to french. That is, when I listen to my homestay family, I don't translate what they're saying inot english in my head, I just understand it in french. When I read I do a little more mental translating, just becuase I have the text in front of me and have time to go through it word for word, thinking in terms of verb tenses and grammar to figure out if it really meant what i think it meant, but if i just read it and don't focus on grammarI get the gist of it without translating it to english. When I'm writing my own stuff I probably think up what i want to say in french at least as often as I think it up in english, and that's geting better, but when I talk, I almost always 'know' what I want to say in english before I figure out how to put begin to put it into french.
this frustrates for two reasons; one, becuase if you try to think up everything you want to say in one language, then translate it to another before you say it, it takes more than double the time it would have taken to respond than if you had initially thought it up in french, and two, you can't translate everything you can say in english into french, because there are no exact translations and even if there were, you're not advanced enough to find them - so, a lot of the time you have to circumscribe what you want to say in order to begin to express the gist of it in french that's simple enough for you to use - consequently, when you start with complex english sentance structures and try to find french equivalents you get confused and bogged down in grammar and often can't express what it is you want to say, whereas if you start with a simple french sentance and think "how can I use this structure to communicate what I want," you're a lot more successful.
an interesting sidenote is, having said that, and having asserted that I usually understand my homestay family in french, without translation, I remember the things they tell me in english - that is, i store the gist of our french conversations automatically with english words. I wonder why that is.
this frustrates for two reasons; one, becuase if you try to think up everything you want to say in one language, then translate it to another before you say it, it takes more than double the time it would have taken to respond than if you had initially thought it up in french, and two, you can't translate everything you can say in english into french, because there are no exact translations and even if there were, you're not advanced enough to find them - so, a lot of the time you have to circumscribe what you want to say in order to begin to express the gist of it in french that's simple enough for you to use - consequently, when you start with complex english sentance structures and try to find french equivalents you get confused and bogged down in grammar and often can't express what it is you want to say, whereas if you start with a simple french sentance and think "how can I use this structure to communicate what I want," you're a lot more successful.
an interesting sidenote is, having said that, and having asserted that I usually understand my homestay family in french, without translation, I remember the things they tell me in english - that is, i store the gist of our french conversations automatically with english words. I wonder why that is.