I heard that this is a bad idea, good that I don't use that
is it really bad??? cause mind translation is when you read in English but you translate it to your mind your native tongue.
for example, using mind translation when you read
"The dog was killed"
you read:
"o cachorro foi morto"
but you have to read
"the dog was killed" and not in tour mother tongue ....
I think for me mental translation wouldn't be a problem for me since I have a major knowledge of English, but for those who are starting to learn, it may be bad.
And how would you explain to a non english speaker "The dog was killed"? Would you kill a dog, point a finger on it and say that sentence? lol
And yeah, mind translation is generaly bad, because it slows down your comprehension of speech. Attaching English words to your mother tongue words is a mistake. English words are defined in English, not in different languages. That's why it's good to use english-english dictionaries. Taking a english-{your language} dictionary should be the last solution, if you really can't imagine what a word means. Many english learners don't realise this. You can never be as fluent as native speakers if you use mind translation.
Except I don't know anywhere I can buy an Afrikaans-Afrikaans dictionary, so I have to use Afrikaans-English instead ... not all languages have easily available dictionaries.
I'd go for PICTURE translation; that is, when I read a sentence like "A dog was killed" as I read "A dog" I picture in my mind a dog,and so on; that's why I am able to keep on reading as if I were watching something instead of translating words into my mother tongue
What do you think about?
It is easy to imagine a dog. But it becomes difficult to imagine auxilliary verbs, verbs or adjectives.
Which picture would you use if you hear the word spot. A dot, spotlight, blot ,...,. Language is more complex, I guess.
Jaro, you are right up to a point, to use a English-English dictionariy is good when you want the meaning of some english word. but what about when you want to know the meaning of a spanish word? how would you know the meaning of "perro" if you didn't have a spanish-english dictionary?
In that case you of course need a Spanish->English dictionary. What I was trying to point out was to not use a English->Spanish dictionary.
I'd say that you need both , when you reached a certain level you will prefer to use only English-English dictionary, but even at that level you will need the Spanish-English or English-Spanish one to check up and to make sure that you are going to use a word in the right context.
Chris,
I beg to differ. "Equivalents" given by bilingual dictionaries are often used in completely different contexts in both languages. The way to find out about the contexts is to look at usage examples in an English-English dictionary.
The reason why I'm using English-English dictionary is because my english-slovak dictionary shows up usually 6 or more meanings which is very confusing, and almost impossible to learn the real meaning of english word. English-english dictionary doesn't usually display more than 2 meanings explained by definition and few sample sentences.
Tom,
I definitely agree with you , the only thing I wanted to point out is that you do need to use both dictionaries as the example of the word "perro" clearly explained the reason. I think reference dictionaries are also very useful but they're not much popular I guess.
Have you noticed with two-way dictionaries that you will look up a word in one language, and it will not be there. But if you look up the same word in the other language, it will be there!
The best way is not to translate at all - when you read something in your native language you just visualise what you read. If you can read another language fluently the same process should be occuring.
Tremmer,
You got what I wanted to say before, that is what I feel when I read or elaborate ideas in English and, to me, it's the best way.
That's true Jaro. I find the same problem in an english-spanish dictionary which comes with a lot of different meaning of each word so as you said it is very confusing. the botton line is that an english-english dicctionary is good for most of the times but not for all.
