Saturday, April 2, 2011

Head translating

Learning a language, when speaking two languages already fluently can be tricky. With latin there was nothing similar to what i am now facing, due to the fact that it is a dead language. When reading texts in german or english i am not able to clearly translate words or sentences, because you start to think in that language at some point. Now for chinese my head translates the sentences before i can understand the sentence often. Easy words already stay the chinese word, but complex structures i often try to translate in my head. Some structures are similar to english structures. As an example there are sentences that are very much like If-Clauses. So i translate them to If in my head anyway, complex words i translate to german or english, considering what makes more sense at that point in my head, so in the end i have a translated sentence in my head that consists of chinese, english and german parts. It works for me till i am able to actually "think" in chinese like i do in german and english, but it already shows me that it will be hard for me to translate stuff for anyone, if it's not just for my understanding.

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