Thinking in a Language

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Cainntear, Jul 23, 2014.

  1. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Note - This is a discussion that broke out from the thread exit plan for isolated vocabulary.


    I don't see it as a practical solution as I still don't know what it means or how to do it. As far as I can see, "thinking in the language" means the same as "knowing the language" or even "having learnt the language" ie it is the intended end-state of the learning process. Telling someone that they have to "think in" the language to learn it is like telling them that the secret to getting rich is to make lots of money.
    Nobody? Well I would, for one. It's a meaningless sentence, because I find it difficult to imagine the when, where or why of saying it. Language is communication, and there is no useful message in a sentence like that.
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  2. Iversen

    Iversen Member VIP member

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    I remember that we have discussed this before, and it turned out that we are very different in this respect. I have a constant inner monologue going on in my head (which I see as an integrated part of my thinking and not just a subsequent translation of some kind). I can use that monologue for language learning simply by switching to a target language. Of course this presupposes that I know the essentials of that language, but as my examples with the green tree shows I can permit myself to have lacunes or grammatical errors in my sentences which could be embarrassing if I had used the same formulations for communication. When I think in my own head I can choose to emphasize correctness, but the normal purpose is to train persistence and robustness, and to prepare for situations where I have formulate sentences that have a communicative purpose. So it is more important to formulate something than to formulate perfect utterances - and besides I can't walk around looking words up all day long.

    As far as I remember Cainntear denied having such an inner monologue, which is very hard for me to imagine, except by thinking of situations where I think in music or pictures - thinking in/of nothing is for me the same as not thinking at all, which may be a goal for people who do meditation, but not something I would want to experience.

    The relevance for the present discussion is of course that thinking in a language forces me to incessantly recall words, which is the perfect kind of training if you want to retain and activate words learned through wordlists or other techniques. And this is of course not something that only is relevant for the words you just have learned - you need to be able to recall and use words from the whole of your vocabulary. Maybe constant speaking could have the same effect, but even during discussions I would be thinking more than speaking.
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  3. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    I've never denied having an inner monologue. I do find, though, that with time it has become a bit uncontrollable and I find it difficult to force it into a particular language. I always need some kind of context to force my brain to speak a particular language. Before I visited Barcelona for a short holiday, I was in Catalan for a week. Sadly, when I moved on to visit a friend in Italy, I was still stuck in Catalan...

    Regardless, inner monologue/dialogue isn't what most teachers mean when they talk about "thinking in a language" - they mean it as the opposite to translation. Inner verbalisations are production, which brings us back to the input vs output debate.

    I saw an interesting study a few years ago that showed that beginning music students improved their skills in production by listening to the same stuff as they were learning, but only if they listened shortly after practising - exposure before practise showed no benefits. The theory is that production builds neural circuitry, and that exposure can activate and strengthen those circuits.

    Now I'd suggest that anyone who learns a language in a "silent period" way engages in active internal production, and that they're struggling to decode the input in order to learn the production rules, at which point it's added to their internal rehearsal. Once it has been adequately rehearsed, it will be understood without problems. Of course, I can't prove this, because it all goes on inside their heads.
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  4. Iversen

    Iversen Member VIP member

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    Cainntear's answer above makes the situation much more comprehensible for me. It is NOT a question of chatter versus silence, but rather about controlling which language you use for your inner verbalisations and being able to stick to a language even though you have problems formulating certain things. But this can definitely also be difficult to do. I remember a situation from Berlin where I had been speaking Spanish to some people, after which I tried to turn around on my chair and speak Romanian to another group. Normally I wouldn't have problems thinking in Romanian, but the first group continued their discussion in Spanish behind my back, and that meant that I constantly tended to glide back into Spanish.

    Luckily the ability to switch languages and to stick to a chosen language can be trained, just as the ability to doggedly continue your thinking in a weak language can.

    I'm not in constant contact with pedagogical circles so I don't know what most teachers mean when they talk about "thinking in a language". But for me it is pretty clear what it means - and thinking in another language most of the time and then translating those thoughts is a stage you should get over as fast as possible. That being said, I also sometimes want to say/think something and then discover that I don't know how to do it. In that situation it is almost inevitable that a formulation from a better known language fills out the hole. The big question is whether you remember what your problem was the next time you are near a dictionary.
  5. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Now you're confusing two things, Iversen. The inner monologue is speech that hasn't been physically uttered, but it's still "spoken" by the brain. The process of how you construct your speech doesn't change just because it hasn't been physically expressed.

    Internal practise simply gives us more production practise than would otherwise be available to us. With more practise, we learn to recall the rules quicker until we reach the point where we don't pause while we look them up in our mental store by whatever means (and at the beginning, this will normally be translation).

    What most people mean by "thinking in a language" is better described as "thinking into a language." Thought has little link, if any, to language - language is the modem we use to transfer thoughts to each other. But learning to "think into" a language... well, isn't that just "learning a language"?
  6. Iversen

    Iversen Member VIP member

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    For a brief moment I thought we didn't really disagree. But we do. Not in believing that thinking in a language isn't fundamentally different from speaking, but maybe in the interpretation of this. For me thinking in a language is involved whenever I speak, so adding some mouth movements isn't a big deal- the central part of the job is happening in the brain. The thing that ends up as a thought may have worked its way up through some inconscient levels which aren't linguistic in any sense of the word, but the process is still going on when it reaches the conscience, and it isn't finished before the concrete formulations are forged in a certain language - and the tools offered by that language probably play a role in deciding what I choose to think, though not to the extent that I can't think things which are hard to expres in that language (the 'weak' Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). The thought has become language as soon as I become aware of it. So with this in mind, I simply don't understand the formulation "But learning to "think into" a language... well, isn't that just "learning a language"?" No, I think with the parts of the language I already have learned, and even though that part may be small and shaky this is thinking IN a language, not into it.

    The nearest thing to thinking "into" a language in my world is thinking a thought in one language and then deciding to translate it into some other language.
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  7. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    This is an interesting conversation, and it seems to me that the differences above are regarding conscious directed thinking, and subconscious thinking that just naturally happens without direction. One sees something or someone and some thought in one's native language often just pops up in a flash without direction, like "good we need some rain" or "great, another damn thunderstorm." That phenomena happens easily in one's native language, but from my experience in German, not as naturally in an L2. Only after a year or so of a silent period are some of those thoughts involuntarily bubbling up (as opposed to vocabulary learned in Anki or phrases from the audio of a course which is a common occurrence).

    But to get to the point where that subconscious involuntary thinking occurs more than rarely, it seems to me that I need to actively train this ability, which I think Iversen advocates. Kato Lomb also advocated this and stressed its importance, i.e. spending time conducting an interior monologue (she preferred the term autologue). In fact she said it was a matter of self-discipline.

    This type of directed monologue would have been painful and mostly impossible for me at an earlier stage in German, simply because I didn't have enough tools, the grammar and vocabulary, to be able to do it without constantly inserting English. But now it is possible and I have been making an effort to have short monologues and it is much easier. I still run into not knowing a word, at least actively, or not knowing the proper grammatical way of expressing a thought or concept, but these interior monologues show me where I need some additional work.

    And when I break my silent period with either speaking or most likely more extensive writing, that training for more spontaneous thinking will be the reason I will be able to succeed, which is the reason Iversen believes thinking precedes such output (if I have understood him correctly). Thus it seems to me appropriate that Iversen has proposed thinking as an addition to the traditional 4 language skills.
    Last edited: Jul 26, 2014
  8. Rodri

    Rodri New Member

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    Hi all, I've just found this forum and this is an interesting discussion for me. Lately I've been trying out this "thinking" technique (I saw a couple of post from Iversen at HTLAL and decided to give it whirl) , so I'm going to talk about my impressions so far:

    1) Thinking in your TL is just like speaking without actually uttering the sounds, so in principle it seems like a good practice, given that I don't have the opportunity to engage in conversation very often.

    2) I's extremely tiring and so I don't think I can get myself to do it with any regularity. The talking in your head is just a bit difficult because you have to construct complete sentences, so you have to somehow slow down you normal thinking process, fine, that's the point of the practice, but what I find excruciating is the "thinking what to say" part. Either I don't have an inner monologue, or it's rather foggy. Either way I can't seem to be able to control it without getting exhausted. I'm gonna keep trying a bit more though.
  9. Iversen

    Iversen Member VIP member

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    This discussion certainly deserves it own thread.

    As I see it it has two sides: how 'linguistic' is thinking in general (a philosophical problem that may soon be formulated in neuropsychological therms), and how can you use thinking in a language as part of your language learning (a pedagogical problem). In principle you could force yourself to think in some target language as training, even if language as such just was a kind of late addition or reworking of the 'reel' thoughts. I'm not quite sure, but this could be Caintearr's position. But for me there isn't any 'reel' thought behind the linguistic form. The thought isn't shaped in any sense before the linguistic process already has grabbed it and expressed it in words. OK, as I mentioned there are also alinguistic thoughts - like when you write music or paint paintings, and maybe also if a skilled mathematician thinks in formulas as visual shapes or a runner adjust his/her speed and route in kinesthetic therms. But at least for me language is so all pervasive that it tend to fill out all empty spots when I don't think in other cognitive modes.

    But the brain is somewhat lazy, so thinking tends to be formulated in a person's native language, and it may take a conscious decision decision to switch to any other language - especially a weak one, where your thoughts will be fragmentary and full of errors. And this leads to the other side of the question: how to use thinking in another language for training purposes. The problem of finding something to think about turns out to be a surprising big problem when you have problems forging pretty sentences (because it is so tempting to slide back into your native language), but there are some small tricks that can make it easier. For instance it easier to make your own sentences in language X if you are in middle of a torrent of of input in that language. So try to do your thinking with TV or podcasts belching out words in language X in the background. Or try translating a TV program in a wellknown language (maybe even your own) into your target language - even though you know the result will be a pure disaster. But having something outside you to push you forward like bulldozer or snowplough while being bombarded with possible things to think about is conducive to foreign-language cogitation. Silence and possible boredom aren't.

    If there isn't such an outside language pushing agent you have to work harder. If I'm sitting on a bus with too many people around me to study texts I may still look out the window and think things like "that tree is green" (yes, I have used this example before, but it is a good place to start). Then I may add a dose of politics or comments based on posters along the way, but as both Peregrinus and Rodri have discovered it is hard work to prodice thoughts in a weak language when there isn't something external to push your thoughts forward. However the task becomes even harder if you try to produce complete and totally correct sentences from the beginning. But your thoughts are your own business and nobody elses, so just cut down on your ambitions - if necessary to the point where you just try to remember things from your recent studies or improvise grammatical exercises based on the few and scattered words you remember. With some training this will develop into more wellformed formulations, but I wouldn't even claim that my thoughts are uniformly excellent and complete in Danish. So why should they be top quality in a weak language?

    Today I read a bilingual text in Greek and Danish about nuclear energy in the bus-back-home-from-my-job, followed by an article about solar energy. And this meant that I had both some interesting things to think about and some recently brushed-up vocabulary on the paper before me, and whenever I thought my stream-of-consciousness was threating to dry out I could read a few lines more, then the language machine started running again. Written materials aren's as efficient in this respect as spoken ones because reading is more of an active process than listening, but they are better than nothing.
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2014
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  10. Rodri

    Rodri New Member

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    Wow, I haven't thought of that, but it seems like a good exercise to try, especially at an advanced level when you don't run the risk of translating too literally. A good starting point could be interviews, because people talk slowly and often stop to think.
  11. Rodri

    Rodri New Member

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    That sounds interesting, then why do you think that 'silent period' learners need to go through a phase of activation (even if brief) to really become good at talking? Isn't that internal rehearsal enough?
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  12. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Iversen has given some excellent practical tips above to help start the thinking engine in an L2. I have noticed too, that if I have been doing something else in German, whether reading, listening to audio from a course, etc., that it helps to "prime the pump". While as he has said, we shouldn't be too concerned about making pretty sentences or even whole brief monologues, one aspect that does concern me is connecting them well so that I don't end up with a series of simple declarative sentences. And this means my spending more time on various German sentence structures so that they more readily come to mind.

    Examples would be "was für ein", "es geht/handeln um", etc. Plus discourse markers (not particles) and lexical chunks (n-grams). I have been trying to assemble a collection of such discourse markers and lexical chunks, and indeed some are already on many of my Anki cards in the example phrases and sentences. In other words, lexical items that allow for smoother beginnings, transitions and ends without necessarily trying to be "pretty". It seems to me that making such lexical items active, which thinking is, will help me to more naturally just start thinking in German, with German structures.
  13. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Exercises which are meant to support
    1) word separation
    2) thinking in a language
    3) talking to oneself
    I see as a waste of time for me, because they happen naturally. I also feel that these can be used as reasons for beginners to delay production, which I feel is usually a mistake.
  14. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    That's not what I'm talking about. My point is that "true" thought is non-linguistic, and it's only when we try to observe our thought processes that it is put into grammar and words.

    The background thought process that makes you want to say "I don't know" is the same one that makes you want to say "je ne sais pas", with the minor difference of some contextual switch that trips and results in a different language leaving your mouth.

    The reason I object to the opposition of "think in" vs "translate to" is that if I understand what I'm saying, and not just parroting unthinkingly, my brain unavoidably retrieves the English equivalent. All that happens as you get better at a language/languages is that your target language circuits get better at overriding the native language impulse until such point as you're not aware that the impulse is three any more, but it will be,

    That fatigue isn't much different to what you encounter when you try to speak, though. Breaking through the pain barrier is easier when there isn't someone standing in front of you, waiting for you to spit it out.

    I agree that you internal practice doesn't have to be complete, but I still think it should be correct....
  15. Iversen

    Iversen Member VIP member

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    My point is that there isn't such a thing as a 'true' thought , which ends just before some little daimon comes along, grabs it and finds some suitable words to express it.

    Thoughts start somewhere at an inconscient level, and when they move upwards like bubbles they can become clad in imagery or tactile sensations or words. Obviously they are more likely to be formulated in words in a language which to a large extent has become automatized, but that isn't a rule without exceptions. If I visit Rome Italian words - and not least place names - will become more frequent in my thoughts, including those that come without a conscious decision to think about something. However I can decide to force that process in the direction of Italian, and then there may still be an influence from Danish somewhere below the surface, but the final version will be in Italian.

    Introducing a gap between some 'true' thought and its linguistic form is an unnecessary complication.
  16. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    While I think Cainntear is right as far as science goes, and since it is obvious one has thoughts that don't even get translated into any formal language, I also agree with Iversen here simply because there is no point to worrying about that distinction. Only if someone could show something practical that could or should be done to either take advantage of or limit negative effects of that distinction, would it be worth thinking about. Other than of course, merely "priming the pump" with input to get one's brain to switch more readily to a desired L2, or the extreme case of being able /forced to never intentionally use one's L1.
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  17. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    The reason I think that it's important is the "never translate" mantra. The only exercises I can ever do without an underlying urge to produce the sentence in another language are ones that I would describe as "mechanical" or "word juggling" - Where I'm not involved in thinking at all about the meaning of the phrase. You know, thinks like "covert the following nouns from singular to plural.

    I say the distinction is important because it helps inform us which exercised to use. If you try to avoid having the urge to say something in your native language, you're going to be avoiding actual language in favour of abstract tasks that don't engage the language centres.

    Better, surely, to accept the urge, but resist it, no...?
  18. numb

    numb New Member

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    Interesting discussion ! so i'm new in this forum and i wanna to know whats your position for those that they think always with another language. that's was the case for me until now, i can't stop thinking in English until now. there is no secrets !!! everything happened right now in my life i expressed in English right now, it's 2 years of training i can say that's it's hard work but it's possible. all what i did until now it's just developing the level of thinking starting with :
    - expressing everything around me with talking with my self time to times (Its normal we can't wait until we will find someone to sepeak with him).
    - then starting to think with language slowly.
    - I achieved right now the level 4 of thinking it's not fast but it's normal.

    the problem is i'm looking for other level by learning new technique of thinking example the last level in mind when thinking it's resolving mathematical problem fastly in english.


    DO you have any other suggestion ?


    I'm looking forward for your answer !!!
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  19. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Hi numb, welcome to the forum! I'm like you - my thinking improves naturally as my other skills improve, and I don't try to do anything special for it. So I hope someone here can tell us how to specifically work on thinking at your level; I'm also curious.
  20. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    I think he gave a pretty good suggestion here:

    So you start with daily surroundings and happenings and try to move your thoughts from L1 to L2. Just simple stuff to get the ball rolling like "I need to go to the grocery to buy some food and drinks". I have been trying this in German, and while the first thought or two is a translation from what I instinctively thought in English, I try to go from there and add to it in German only. I don't spend a lot of concentrated time on it necessarily, just random moments when I can start with something simple. Plus the old trick of trying to name as many things around you in the L2.

    Welcome to the forum as well numb. Could you elaborate on what you mean by "level 4"?

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