How can I stop myself translating everything I read?

Japanese Language Reading
1

I currently train my reading skills with jalup sentences.
I pretty much understand every review sentence.

But it takes longer than neccessary because I feel the urge to translate every sentence to english or german.

Any advice on how to stop this ?

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2

You gain confidence through practice

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3

Pretty much. The more one practices, the more patterns of the language one learns and the more second nature it becomes.

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4

I find that as sentences grow more complex, it requires a lot more effort to translate them into English because there’s not a good one-to-one translation pattern for many grammatical structures. This results in it simply being faster and easier to read along and understand what’s being expressed in Japanese.

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5

For the moment I try to picture the scene in my head instead of translating.

Seems like I need something that tells me: you got it :thinking:

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6

So you understand what it’s written, but always feel the need of translating to make sure you got it? Is that it? If so, maybe check for things where both JP and EN versions exist. I can think of song lyrics, anime subtitles… Maybe watch anime with JP subs and then with the EN ones. Not sure if that will help you out.

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7

As everyone has said, you just have to keep practising. If you can, try to read more native material. Context can really help, since you can often jump directly to the thing that the word represents, rather than the meaning in your own language.

8

yes, if the example sentence is a question I could even answer it :slight_smile:

I probably should have asked how to get rid of a bad habbit :grin:

9

Like the others, I think you’ll stop translating as you get more comfortable with the language.

I find that there are levels of understanding for me…

  • Things I understand instinctively
  • Things I understand if I just go over the japanese more slowly
  • Things I need to translate in order to understand
  • Things I don’t understand at all.

Perhaps something similar is true for you?

Otherwise, the only advice I have is to not do the translation :b Especially in the beginning I sometimes also found myself doing it needlessly, but I basically just tried not to… :man_shrugging:

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10

You will get tired of it eventually.

11

Electro shocks?

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12

I think talking to Japanese people, if possible go live in Japan, understand their things, situations in Japanese itself as we did it in childhood, we learn that the fruit with red color and a odd round shape is apple. So now we don’t need to think about it when we see that.
This way can really help very well. It might be a bit difficult initially but one can gain a surprising command eventually.

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13

Yes!
Immersion is the answer. One of the things I really don’t like about wanikani is that it forces you to reach into English every time you look for a meaning. It really helps me that I learned to speak Japanese before I tried reading it. Being able to think in a language is important right from the start.

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Give your brain something else to do, like read it out in Japanese in your head or just the particles.

I did that to stop myself reading the numbers out in English.

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15

While you eventually learn to stop reaching into English (or another language), it’s impossible to just abandon English for Japanese right at the start.

Sure once you have 1000s of words of vocabulary you can start doing things like nominalization or rephrasing, but at first, you kind of have to start with what you already know, in our case English.

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