2011-05-20, 12:49 PM
I also love learning new languages, it's just awesome to know you can now speak to even more people on the world. Though I guess it's hard to get a high level on more than 3-4 languages (though I still have many years in front of me). I currently roll in portuguese (mother language), english (12 years of studying it + using it daily on forums/games and watching shows in english), french (2 years of studying plus now 10 months of living in Paris) and just a little bit of spanish from having been quite a few times to Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.
When I'm studying in a different language I usually won't translate things at all, what I'm studying here in France is all learned directly in french. If I had to take a test in portuguese on what I've learned here I would have a very difficult time. It's still harder than having classes in portuguese, of course, but that's just because I don't speak french as fluently. I never make the step french -> portuguese, attempting to translate doesn't work for me, I just change the language I think in and then work only on that language (like I'm currently thinking in english while I spent my day at work thinking in french).
Retalion Wrote:2. It is easier to learn from your first language. Simply put, because you have more experience and more understanding of your first language, you learn better in it. Say you're a Chinese student in an ESL class learning say Social Studies. You'll have a hard time, because you have to translate twice (social studies language into English, then into Chinese), and thus lose parts of its meaning in the translations (as nothing is able to be completely translated to hold the same context, meaning, and usage). In such a situation, the best way to understand would be to translate it into the home language (in this case, Chinese) and then think about it from that language.
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When I'm studying in a different language I usually won't translate things at all, what I'm studying here in France is all learned directly in french. If I had to take a test in portuguese on what I've learned here I would have a very difficult time. It's still harder than having classes in portuguese, of course, but that's just because I don't speak french as fluently. I never make the step french -> portuguese, attempting to translate doesn't work for me, I just change the language I think in and then work only on that language (like I'm currently thinking in english while I spent my day at work thinking in french).