- Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from DoingEnglish.com.
When I speak in English, my first language,
everything in my head is all in English.
But when I speak Japanese, my second language,
everything in my head, completely changes to Japanese.
Not only that, but because of the way I have set up
my everyday lifestyle, unless I'm specifically
doing something or specifically working in English,
my thinking, what's going on in my head,
tends to default not to English, my first language,
but actually to Japanese, my second language.
Recently, EES member, Vanessa,
English and about mental translation.
She said that when she speaks English,
everything in her head is stuck in her native language.
This makes her disfluent, it makes her
speaking awkward and sound unnatural.
So I decided to write this month's issue of the EES Gazette
on thinking in English and more
specifically, on mental translation.
What it is, why it happens, the problems it causes
and more importantly, how to stop it from happening.
Just in case you're not sure, the EES Gazette
is a monthly print newsletter that
I send out once a month to EES members.
Each issue is dedicated to a single topic
related to using extraordinarily
Now, I have to be honest, I personally don't have
much trouble with mental translation.
As I said, when I speak in English, I think in English.
When I speak in Japanese, my second
language, I think in Japanese.
But for people who do have a problem with this,
it does cause big problems, translating
everything in your head and this really
is caused by the way by certain learning styles
that create bad translation habits.
Translating everything in your head,
will lead to you being disfluent, speaking in a slow,
awkward, unnatural, unnative-like manner.
Clearly, this is not a good thing
if we wanna speak fluent, extraordinarily good English.
This said, it's actually not entirely true
to say that I never have a problem with mental translation,
difficult to switch between languages.
When I'm having a conversation in English,
everything in my head is in English.
So if the conversation suddenly switches to Japanese,
I become very confused and my Japanese
sounds very English-like, very awkward
and very disfluent, like I'm translating
It takes a few moments for my head to catch up
and to switch into Japanese, and the
same thing happens the other way too.
If I'm having a conversation in Japanese,
everything in my head is in that language.
So if suddenly the conversation switches to English,
it takes awhile for my head to catch up
and my English becomes very disfluent
and very awkward and unnatural sounding,
like I am translating from Japanese.
There are very powerful psycholinguistic reasons
for this happening, related to how the brain works
and the language mechanisms that you have in your Brain.
I'm gonna go into detail about this in September's issue
of the EES Gazette, where we talk
What it is, why it happens, the problems it causes
and again, importantly, how to stop it from happening.
If you want to get your hands on this
extraordinarily special mental translation,
thinking in English issue of the EES Gaztte,
you're gonna have to be an EES member,
because that's when the bad boy goes to print
and gets sent out to everybody.
To become a member or to just find out more information