Word for Word

In one of my previous posts I mentioned that one of the things I did during lockdown was to focus on language learning.  I have been learning Spanish for many years but I have also taken a particular interest in Swedish lately - sparked by the decision to binge-watch the entire series of True Blood and a particular fascination with Eric Northman played by Alexander Skarsgård, and Pamela Swynford De Beaufort played by Kristin Bauer van Straten both of whom speak Swedish to each other in a few scenes - it was those scenes where I understood what was said with little effort that piqued my interest.

If you set out to learn a language and hope to find translations that say what you would say in English word for word then you're probably not going to get very far with your endeavour.  For example the word "tack" in Swedish literally translates as "thanks" and the word "snälla" literally translates as "please" - what you'll find however is that a lot of situations in English where the word "please" is used, in place "tack" is used when speaking in Swedish.  You can insist on being literal and learn the literal translation and stick with it, but it won't be natural to a native speaker to hear you say it, and will be an indicator that you learned the language later in life as a second language.

This is one of the things I love about learning languages, the fact that there is an element of cultural exchanged involved, that as some point you have to give up the idea of 1:1 translation and learn how the same meaning would be communicated in the language you are learning.  I think this is one of the reasons people often fail to make progress in learning to speak another language, the idea that you need to learn how to take your English thoughts and translate those into another language proves to be the greatest barrier to language learners; those that progress and gain proficiency in multiple languages on the other hand learn to "think" in another language and learn to associate the language with the concepts and the ideas they represent instead, that way you don't think in one language, then translate, instead you think in that language.

The idea of thinking in another language can seem alien at first especially to people who are trying to learn a new language for the first time having never acquired another language or never been successful in their study of other languages in the past.  What you have to remember though is that as a child you learned what an Orange was before you knew what to call it.  You saw it, you recognised the size, the shape, the colour, and learned to associate the word "Orange" with what you saw, and eventually reached the point where you were presented with an orange and knew what to call it without having to stop and think about it.  As you can imagine, doing this for everything you encounter in life is time consuming, it took you many years, in some cases even decades to get to the level of proficiency you now possess in your native language.  When you set out to learn another language, you are guided by the desire to compress this process down into a matter of weeks rather than waiting years, the futility of this endeavour is what ultimately leads to the failure rate of language acquisition that we see.

If however you abandon the aspiration of learning "everything" in a short space of time and instead focus on the "core" of the language, the subset of the language that you will use the most then you can make your goal much more realistic.  This focus however requires you to forgo your ego and accept that there will be things you just don't know how to say, and that in time you will learn these words through "osmosis" as it were.  That is a word that is often used in reference to this process but at its most fundamental it is the assertion that the most important words you need to remember will be acquired naturally.  This of course is a lot easier when you have exposure to others who speak the language you want to learn - when you can use immersion.  This isn't always possible.

Immersion is very useful but if you don't have the opportunity to live in an environment where the language you are learning is spoken every day then realistically this isn't possible.  Barriers to this might be economic, you may not have the finance to be able to do this or it may be due to factors beyond your control (like a global pandemic) or it could be that such a place doesn't actually exist - many languages are considered "dead" when they are not used everyday anywhere in the world e.g. Latin [although the Vatican does use a derivative known as Ecumenical Latin], others are considered esoteric when they are only used by those who have knowledge of them e.g. fictional languages like Klingon or High Valyrian, and some languages are constructed to serve a purpose e.g. Esperanto which was designed to be a "Universal" language always intended to be secondary.

So if you can't immerse yourself in a language what other options do you have?  Well in my experience the only other option is to increase your exposure to that language.  If software you use supports multiple languages, then try changing the interface language to the one you are learning - if you are familiar with the interface you'll be able to navigate it even in another language and you will learn where certain words are used in practice.  If you can read a bit of a language then national news outlets provided by public broadcasters tend to use the most academic form of the language free from colloquialisms, clichés, and local dialect quirks.  If you have a particular love of a book or movie series that you have watched many times over, see if you can find a translation of that content as you will be familiar with it.  Books can be a great way to learn if you can manage to read them, it may seem like an odd idea as an adult but books particularly aimed at children are a better place to start.  Music is another option if you can explore artists that produce content in the language you want to learn then you can further increase your exposure, the same applies to podcasts and online radio streams as those will also give you exposure to people speaking the language in their natural voice, the more relevant it is to your interests the more engaging you will find the content.