ly reduces your learning time and actually can stop you from developing the skills you need to learn whilst you are using the language.
This might sound a bit harsh, but I have seen this in many students who keep returning to classes and make very slow progress.
Of course we never see infants trying to memorise vocabulary. They just learn the vocabulary, again, through usage of it. On the other hand, many people who learn a second language put time aside to memorise vocabulary. Just consider what would happen if you didn’t put time time aside for this task. You would then need to put your attention on what you need to do to retain what you learned. Wouldn’t that be something! 🙂 The reality is that by focussing our energies on how we can be better learners, we can discover strategies to achieve precisely that.
You know what it’s like when you face a difficult problem. You spend time thinking about it, you ask people about it, you may even dream about it. You end up activating more of yourself and you will eventually figure out that you do have ways of solving the problem in front of you.
Translation is only a skill we develop later in years. Infants learn their first language through a variety of means. All parents will tell you how attentive their children are. They see things in a light we don’t because they have no cultural, attitudinal, or perceptual filters. They work out from what they see and what they hear, and that meaning can be conveyed. They learn that actions can replace crying ( pointing to what they want, for example). Then there are words that can be used to name things, including people, around them as well as to get food brought to them (also instead of crying!). All this they learn by themselves through observation and action.
By an excessive reliance on translation there is a real danger that these kinds of capacities we all have never get a real chance to show themselves. Don’t get me wrong; translation does have a place … it’s just that an over-reliance deadens the amazing capacities we all have. Sometimes these capacities have been driven underground, so when we turn to language learning, these capacities don’t naturally pop up. They have to be teased out by putting ourselves in situations where they need to come out.
By trying to stay away from translating as much as we can, we can stimulate these capacities to reveal themselves and, over time, to become increasingly powerful.
Practicing grammar in artificial ways
Of course infants practice what they are learning. However, they do this by using the language; not through artificial exercises such as the kinds you will find in language course books and most language classes. These exercises are flawed for many reasons. One key cause is that they are one-dimensional, only calling upon simple memory skills. Language is far more than that. Again, if you want to stimulate the whole variety of skills we have for learning languages, letting go of these kinds of exercises can only do you good.
You are probably asking, “Ok, if I stop doing these, what can I do instead?”. The key thing I would suggest is to focus on using the language, in any way you can. By doing that, you will be forced to recycle what you have learned and it will expose you to new language in situ (not in some artificial setting that strips the layered meaning from the language).
There are ways of semi-artificial learning we can create that can start to approximate ways of education that are more organic and call upon more of ourselves than many exercises do. You will find some here.
Mimicry or straight copying is not something you will see a child do in the way adults typically do. I have been fortunate enough to be around my grandchildren learning English recently. I have seen them have a go at copying what I say, when they don’t understand it. They typically do so with a question tone embedded in the repetition. When this happens, they are typically more questioning the meaning, than the pronunciation, but that is there as well. When I repeat, usually in an explanation of a kind, they m