Moving between languages

We consider alternative teaching strategies.

Our tutoring consultant mostly works in math and science, but now and then his abilities in Spanish or French are called for.  Students in the first couple of years require mostly drills in vocabulary and verb conjugations, plus some question-and-answer exercises.  At this level the main difficulty is to make memorization effective, and as interesting and engaging as possible (which is not always very much).

But later on students become capable of writing whole paragraphs of their own composition.  The first difficulty they express when assigned to do one is often, “I don’t know what I should say.”  Our tutor found that asking a series of questions can often get them started.  But almost invariably they come up with ideas in English, then try to turn them into (say) Spanish.  Sometimes the ideas are too complex or grammatically advanced for their foreign language ability, leading to frustration; other times, sentences come out with torturous syntax.  Sometimes a sentence is grammatically acceptable, but no native speaker would ever say it that way.

That’s one reason we generally discourage translation in learning a language, and encourage working entirely in it as far as possible.  Another is that translation can become a crutch.  Unfortunately, early on one’s capabilities in the new language can be very limited.

But our main reservation about translation is that it is very difficult to do well.  With simple sentences there’s generally no obvious problem.  But even putting, “I played football last year” into Spanish requires a choice among possible past tenses, with different meanings that English leaves ambiguous.  “I played football [once] last year” would be different from “I played football [every weekend] last year.”  With complex or subtle ideas going from one language to another requires a great deal of skill, and indeed may be impossible.  We would rather avoid the task and work entirely in one or the other.

However, that means that translation itself can be a useful challenge in learning.  Take, for instance, a line from an old Jimmy Buffet song: “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.”  It sounds simple enough in English.  But to turn it into Spanish or French we have to go to verbs in the subjunctive and conditional tenses, advanced topics for third-year or later students.  For an additional workout, we could put it into the past.  In the Romance languages it’s straightforward (once we’ve learned the tenses).  In (proper) English, however, it sounds awkward and formal: “Had we not been able to laugh, we would have gone insane.”  Here again, translation becomes misleading.

We’ll leave translation, then, as a challenge and an exercise, and work in one language at a time as far as possible.