It requires less confidence but more motivation than speaking.ĭuring the early stages you may be using more of your native language than your target language, and that is fine. It is easier than speaking in the language because you will not be embarrassed (unless you have a malicious alter-ego). If you know even a few dozen key grammar words you can begin to think in your target language thanks largely to the 80/20 rule in language learning. Thinking in a new language is a decision you can make. A language is much more than words, after all. Reading news and listening to music in this way allows you to begin to develop a contextual world to live in where everything is tied to your target language. The goal is to be surrounded by the language as much as possible so it actually becomes inconvenient to think in your native language. The first and foremost way we can leverage context is to create a language bubble (even if you're learning from home where nobody speaks your language). One of my hobbies is following the field of neuroscience, but instead of boring you with all the data let me simply refer to the Wikipedia page on context-based learning and cite two important bits.ġ) Context-based memory is the reason retracing your steps is useful when you lose something.Ģ) From the scientific literature it is concluded, “when a person is studying, he/she should match the context as best as possible to the testing context.” The more context that is associated with the knowledge the stronger your recollection will be. This is exactly why polyglots associate gestures and other cultural emblems with their language learning. If you interrupt me while I am doing my Mandarin flashcards, no matter what language you speak to me in my brain's first reaction will be to reach for Chinese – at least until it shifts contexts. Our brains are pattern-matching machines and one of the major cues they draw upon is that of context. In this video in the Economist a man reverts to the accent of his youth when thinking about his childhood without even realizing it. There are countless examples like this, and not just in foreign languages. The act of thinking about that place even for a moment, with all the signs and people communicating in Spanish, was enough to shift my mental context. I began to talk about the Dalí museum in northern Spain and before I even realized it I was halfway though a sentence in Spanish. Just a few hours ago I was having a conversation in French and the famous surrealist painter Salvador Dalí came up. Where you are mentally makes an enormous difference. Once you decide to take the plunge, here are some things to keep in mind:
If you’re learning your first foreign language you may want to consider learning Esperanto first, as Benny suggests, in order to become accustomed to thinking in a foreign language. There are two essential parts of thinking in a language: context and conditioning. This is how I approached it the first time around and it did work… eventually… kind of. First time language learners often believe that if they study long enough and hard enough they will eventually just start thinking in the target language, as if a switch had been flipped. It is not necessarily easy to think in a new language (especially if you’ve never done it before) but it is still simple – there is no magic here.
There is also the fact that language and culture are intertwined, and thinking in your target language is an essential part of being able to connect with the people you are trying to get to know. Thinking in a foreign language is an important goal that brings you one giant step closer to becoming fluent. We worked on it together and within a week we were both thinking in the language despite it still being quite new to us. My response was “a week or so.” She was shocked (and understandably so).
Recently a friend asked me how long it would take before she started thinking in French. He speaks Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French and Arabic with varying degrees of fluency. He creates real-life experiments to assess everything from sleeping less to traveling cheaply in order to live a more productive and skillful life. This is a guest post by the author of Life by Experimentation, Zane, who quantifies the path to self-improvement.
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