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Comment by gryson | Hacker News Reader

But... why?

Translation is not something to be avoided for the adult language learner. We should use every advantage at our disposal.

You can spend hours trying to guess the meaning of a word through pictures and context (and not getting anywhere far), or you can spend a minute reading the translated meaning and then spend hours understanding it in context (and reinforcing it, and learning its semantics).

I wonder if this idea of "avoiding the mother tongue" stems from all the misguided marketing surrounding products like Rosetta Stone which advertise "learn like children learn." Spoiler: it takes children years and years of near-constant, directed input to acquire their native language to a high degree.

Edit: But I can see the value in doing this as a thought experiment ("what if translation isn't possible?"), and for that it's interesting.

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It's not like immersive language classes aren't a thing. Even the normal foreign language classes at my university, past the third or fourth semester at least, only had 1 day of English while handling administravia, and then the entire class from then on was in the target language. During summer semester, all of the classes were taught this way, even the introductory ones.

Part of the difference between children learning something and adults learning something is that we have trouble achieving Beginner's Mind.

Finding techniques that work fine to be remedial or even insulting makes you get into your own way. In the extreme case, how do you fill a cup which is already full?

Less philosophically, each language you master gets its own language center in your brain, just as each finger you can control individually maps to an identifiable region of your motor cortex (and if you can't control your pinky, it's because they've blended together). Translating back and forth is a crutch for most, and a separate skill for others (eg, professionals). That's why when you ask your friend, "what did those guys say in the background?" you get something vague back. Nothing translates directly, idioms doubly or triply so.

What did that guy say? He said he's really mad at that other guy, (using a lot of colorful language), and I can say "he's mad" or we can go into why calling someone a dog/goat/cow/fish in this language is one step down from saying bad things about their mother.

Yes, the 'natural approach' to language learning is definitely popular. But in most classroom settings I would be surprised if students weren't exposed to the translated meanings through homework or the textbook. Class would not get very far once students started learning abstract concepts otherwise. Of course, translation is just the very first step in lexical acquisition - it's still a long journey to acquire a word.

>Less philosophically, each language you master gets its own language center in your brain, just as each finger you can control individually maps to an identifiable region of your motor cortex (and if you can't control your pinky, it's because they've blended together).

That's not really true, though, and it also depends on what aspect of language we're talking about (phonology vs. syntax vs. lexical acquisition, for example). In the case of the lexicon, there's good experimental evidence that bilinguals, when hearing one language, activate lexical competitors from both languages (i.e., they are not fully able to inhibit activation of one language in listening). The mind is far more complex than having different "centers" for different things. It's a complex network of signal activation and inhibition.

Of course, that doesn't relate to my original point, which was simply that language learners should not purposefully limit themselves. The incredible amount of time it's going to take to learn abstract concepts without translation far, far outweighs the possible co-activation of translation equivalents.

> in most classroom settings I would be surprised if students weren't exposed to the translated meanings through homework or the textbook

I don't think this is true. At best the student will have their own dictionary. At least in my experience, all the full time foreign language schools I know of teach solely in the language being learned and the textbook is solely in that language as well. The students are a mix from all over the world. The school would not cater to all of them by providing translations in a bunch of different languages.

One thing I dislike about language group classes is that you learn with other non-native speakers (and, in general, with the same experiences that you have).

In other words, you learn and re-enforce each others' common mistakes, misconceptions, mistranslated idioms, and ambiguities in the language that native speakers find instantly jarring. This worsens if the teacher is non-native: I wouldn't place much value in such a class.

I definitely think it's important that you teach your native language/that you learn from a native speaker. Learning Japanese from a novice is not something that I want to do.

> One thing I dislike about language group classes is that you learn with other non-native speakers (and, in general, with the same experiences that you have).

> In other words, you learn and re-enforce each others' common mistakes, misconceptions, mistranslated idioms, and ambiguities in the language that native speakers find instantly jarring. This worsens if the teacher is non-native: I wouldn't place much value in such a class.

I absolutely second this as someone who has taken 3/5 semesters of Chinese. Some classmate's pronounciation is so objectively wrong that I have to pay attention for when they're called on just to mute my volume output. Obviously I can't do this in-person.

I've taken one-on-one courses in another language and it's (believable I suppose) how much faster I've progressed.

Another fault is that some classes are structured so that nobody fails or falls behind (whether they're night classes, at a school, or in a corporate environment). The fault with that is that many other subjects simply don't care if 1/3 of the class fails, but language group classes tend to go at the speed of the lowest individuals.

These classes I was referring to were often taught by a native speaker, so there was always at least one person in any class worth emulating. But that was never really my issue so I am not a good judge of how others experience that problem.

Moving backward a few years, my high school teacher (singular) was a bit odd. He sat us in the same alphabetical pattern every year. Behind me sat a girl with impeccable vocabulary but some of the worst pronunciation in the whole class. Meanwhile I had impeccable pronunciation and a respectable vocabulary.

By senior year she had still not improved, and some days it was more than I could take. It was only a few years ago that I realized that while she couldn’t see me make faces, the teacher could. And so he had to stand up front interacting with her while I was in his field of vision, trying and failing not to make pained facial expressions. I don’t know if he found that frustrating, amusing, or something else.

> But... why?

I started it for two reasons. First there is close to no easy to read content when you begin learning Japanese and there is demand for such thing.

The second reason is to see how far I can go like this. It is a sort of thought experiment like you say in your comment.

I discovered after I started that Hans Ørberg something similar for Latin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_%C3%98rberg ). His Lingua Latina has been quite influential.

Have you tried more traditional textbooks? I understand there's a desire for an easy-to-use interactive app, but I've never come across anything remotely as good as a textbook like Minna no Nihongo (I used this book 20 years ago when I started learning Japanese - maybe I'm biased?).

You can see sample pages here: https://omgjapan.com/products/minna-no-nihongo-shokyu-1-hons...

It is 100% in Japanese, but it has a companion book with translated grammar notes if needed. The majority of the book is excellent content in the form of dialogs and readings designed for beginners. I suppose the exercises work better in a classroom setting...

> First there is close to no easy to read content when you begin learning Japanese and there is demand for such thing.

If you know the alphabets (that is kana), you can try the easiest graded reader such as [1] and progressing from there. It assumes little to no grammar knowledge and comes with illustrations and narrated audio that you can follow along.

[1] https://tadoku.org/japanese/book/4155/

I buy Japanese children's books from amazon.co.jp, but there are also the NHK Easy News. Normal textbooks also have simple texts. Tatoeba has a large number of Japanese sentences with audio and translations to various languages.

I find this approach fascinating, it's simple yet so intuitive! I hope you keep going.

> Translation is not something to be avoided for the adult language learner. We should use every advantage at our disposal.

Because you're relying on the translator to accurately convey the meaning of words to you, which translators rarely do. Most professional translators and language instructors don't exactly have the best grasp of language themselves. They do some 1 to 1 translation of "monkey" and 猿 as if the connotation, denotation, and etymology are all the same when if you look it up, they're only kinda similar but not exactly.

English Wikipedia:

"Monkey is a common name that may refer to groups or species of mammals, in part, the simians of infraorder Simiiformes."

Japanese Wikipedia:

"日本語におけるサル（猿）とは、通俗的な意味ではサル目（霊長目）のうち、ヒト（古人類を含む）を除いたもののことである。"

Former talks about Simians whereas the latter apparently says (correct me if I'm wrong I don't know much japanese) colloquially all non-human primates. Is the translator going to know whether an orangutan or gorilla qualifies as 猿? Probably not, they're not even going to mention it.

Personally I believe people should learn a language well enough to read Wikipedia( or equivalent), and then continue only with media in the language in question from that point onwards.

The Japanese Wikipedia is not a translation of the English Wikpedia. Wikipedia isn’t a good place to learn a language, and especially not by comparison. For example, here’s the Polish Wikipedia page:

404 Not Found

Oh, and here’s the German Wikipedia page:

404 Not Found

…hold on, that’s not right. Both Wikipedias have a disambiguation page, and the first link on them goes to their equivalent of Simian. The point is, every Wikipedia has its own structure, its own rules of what should be a page, and articles might be based on sources in that language, not in English.

> The Japanese Wikipedia is not a translation of the English Wikpedia.

Yeah that's the point. "猿" and "monkey" are unrelated terms that only have a little bit of overlap. Translators ignore this.

> Spoiler: it takes children years and years of near-constant, directed input to acquire their native language to a high degree

You seem to be contrasting this with the implication that it doesn't take adults years of near consta

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