Do you think primarily in English?
kennon: I'm actually learning Russian right now, while living in St. Petersburg, so I think about this a lot. The program I'm in is intended to take us to a high level of fluency-- Superior, or Level 3-4 on the various scales. As a result, there is a lot of talk about thinking in the target language. I, sadly, still feel like I very rarely do this. I can handle very simple contexts rapidly, but I don't know if I'm actually thinking directly in Russian, or simply using the lookup table you describe at an extremely rapid rate. When I read texts or hear other people speaking in Russian, I almost always still reform the sentences into English in my head.Some of the other students seem to not have this problem. By their own admission, they're able to operate in many, if not most, contexts completely in Russian-- though, of course, there's no way to know what this means. They mention dreaming in Russian, for instance. This hasn't happened to me yet. There are times when I can intuit what someone wants without actually translating word for word, but usually that's just because I didn't catch all of their words to begin with.It might be background-- I'm the only engineer, the others are all Russian majors. Maybe they have less need of precise rules and translations. It's very hard for me to adopt a new Russian phrase without having found an English equivalent for it. It might be time spent learning the language. The other students have been at it 2, 3 times longer than I have. It might just be that I'm older: 30, as opposed to 22, 23. When I was in the Peace Corps, the volunteers in their 50s and 60s had huge problems learning the local language. So it's probably true that, at least for most people, the older you get, the more ingrained your modes of thought. I guess that means that the earlier you can expand this, the better.