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Comment by patresh | Hacker News Reader

Learning words by translation is fine but what the book argues is that it's very inefficient, because you seed them with respect to your original language so you build a habit of going back and forth between the languages when trying to come up with a word instead of staying immersed.

The advantage of images is first of all that visual cues are very powerful for memory, the more senses you associate with a memory the stronger it will be (I wonder if anyone has ever tried to incorporate smells into SRS?). Furthermore, it is not always easy to find a decent image but the mere search for this image will make your brain work with that word in mind and create associations.

Granted, it is not easy to find images for words such as "philosophy" but with a bit of creativity it is possible and if not, it's always possible to explain the target word in the target language to stay immersed.

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I tried to define Japanese words from the ground up starting using emojis and then using the word already defined to define more complex words.

https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html

It is doable. There is a book called Lingua Latina per se Illustrata that does it for Latin. I have to admit that it has some limits. At some point you want to go back to using your mother tongue. English is not my first language. I live in the UK everything I read is in English. There are some words I have seen a thousand times and I sort of know what they mean but they become mine only after I look up for their translation.

>At some point you want to go back to using your mother tongue.

It is an interesting point. When you first learn words in your mother tongue, you don't do it by outside reference to another language. Why is it different for you when learning a second language?

In your native language you don't (generally) have a specific goal to learn that word. Unless you feel compelled enough to look at a dictionary or ask someone for a definition (which is basically equivalent to looking at a translation in the language-learning context), you often just live with an incomplete mental model, until it becomes gradually refined from repeatedly hearing/seeing the word in context.

This is required, to some degree, to become fluent (i.e. intuitive) in a new language too, which is why there is an emphasis on immersion/input in most language-learning circles/ideologies. But when you have an explicit goal, you're more likely to be compelled to want the mental shortcut/jumpstart that a translation provides. There's also the fact that, as a language learner, the context itself often isn't understood very well (or at all), which makes the natural process even slower. This is where the idea of "comprehensible input" comes into it, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

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