How to think in Spanish and stop translating in your head is a skill you have to learn and practice, just like you learn and practice your grammar, your vocabulary, your colloquial expressions or your pronunciation.
The ability to think in Spanish has to be as natural and automatic for you as turning on and off the light switch in your house, only you do it with your brain and what you turn on and off is the main language you are thinking in. You go from thinking in your native language to thinking in Spanish.
At the beginning of your Spanish learning, it is quite normal to rely on your native language, even your teacher will use it sometimes because it will help you consolidate some words and grammatical structures.
However, the problem comes when you have left the beginner level behind and are an intermediate level student (level B) and you still don’t know how to think in Spanish and stop translating in your head.
Let’s analyse the process that your mind, your brain, does when it translates what it reads or hears:
Step 1: You hear or read a sentence in Spanish.
Step 2: You translate it in your head into your native language.
Step 3: You think about the answer in your native language.
Step 4: You translate the answer into Spanish.
Step 5: You speak or write in Spanish.
It’s not just the time and energy you’ve spent on these five steps, but the result, step 5, in which you speak or write in Spanish, is slow, sometimes sounds unnatural and has abrupt interruptions. It’s not a fluid and cohesive message.
Conclusion: This process is not efficient.
And it also takes you away from the ultimate goal of learning Spanish, which is to become fluent and speak like Spanish speakers do, l quickly, with good pronunciation, naturally, and using colloquial expressions and slang words.
So, if this process of mentally translating is slow, inefficient, and produces low-quality Spanish, why do some students continue to do it? Why don’t they change their mental chip?
There may be several reasons why some students do not change the ‘native language vs. Spanish’ chip:
You may identify with one or more of the reasons above, but let me remind you that there was a day, when you were still a child, when none of this mattered.
While researching for this article on how to think in Spanish and stop translating in your head, I found this fantastic video from the Use Your Spanish channel, in which the author invites us to reflect on how children learn their native language because it would be the ideal way to experience your Spanish learning.
That is, for a child the word “perro” is not “dog” or “four-legged mammal animal”.
For a child “perro” = 🐕
When children speak in their native language, they don’t analyse every grammatical detail before speaking, or they don’t ask themselves why things are said the way they are. They simply try and try to communicate an idea or a message with the resources they have. And of course, they succeed.
But even adult Spanish speakers make mistakes when speaking and writing.
With this I want to tell you to relax, that it’s okay not to speak or write perfect Spanish. The important thing is to communicate your ideas or messages in Spanish.
I know first-hand how vulnerable it is to speak in a language that is not your native language with a group of native speakers, whether it is over a few beers in a bar or giving a presentation in class. We are terrified of making mistakes and thinking that others are laughing or making fun of us.
This does not happen to young children when they begin to speak and use the resources they have to communicate.
This mix of curiosity, being receptive to adult correction, and repeating what they learn (because children love to repeat things) makes them learn more actively and quickly than adults.
For children, learning new things is not a sacrifice or an effort. Rather, it is like a fun adventure that they love to explore.
In the previous point I mentioned how much children like to repeat things, but they also love to ask questions.
They ask about everything, with that genuine curiosity that makes them receive an incredible amount of information from adults.
Children are constantly surrounded and exposed to language: the conversations of the adults around them, the teacher at school, their friends at nursery or school, stories and books, cartoons on TV, music…
Although they cannot understand all the words or concepts at first, this constant exposure allows them to become familiar with the sounds, intonation and structure of the language in a natural way.
This is what is called passive listening: they absorb the language unconsciously.
In this way, they develop an intuitive understanding of the language as they progress in their development.
So, following the example of how a child acquires his mother tongue, you have the key to knowing how to think in Spanish and stop translating in your head.
Let’s explore seven techniques that can be very useful if you put them into practice to learn how to think in Spanish and stop translating in your head.
Forget about details and colloquial expressions.
When you’re talking to Spanish speakers, reading a text in Spanish, or listening to an audio in Spanish, focus on getting the general idea or message they’re communicating and don’t try to understand every word they’re saying.
If your Spanish is more advanced, you’ll pick up more details and even colloquial expressions, but generally, these details won’t change the meaning of the general idea or message.
Practice your listening comprehension by listening to podcasts, radio, TV series, audiobooks… Create an atmosphere in which Spanish is present around you, like small children do when surrounded by the language, even if there are thousands of things they don’t understand yet.
In this type of listening, known as ‘passive listening’, you don’t pay attention to every word and every detail. You are actually relaxed, just enjoying a podcast or your favourite series in Spanish, following the thread of the main story.
Listening for a long period of time (more than 30-40 minutes) without translation is a good activity to get your brain used to thinking in Spanish.
You can listen to podcasts to practice Spanish related to your interests (not podcasts to learn Spanish), for example travel, history, mystery, psychology, business… And you can also watch series in Spanish, the episodes are not very long and a series can last several weeks, which gives you time to get used to the tone of voice, the accent and the style of speaking of the characters.
This technique works wonders. I can tell you that because I did it with my English.
I had only been in my English school for eight weeks and I was living in Virginia (USA). Then, we had about five or six days off from school and I started repeating everything that an English teacher I followed on YouTube said.
I spent the whole day talking like a parrot in English: in the car while driving, in the kitchen while cooking… Well, as long as I was alone, of course.
When we returned to class after this short break, my English teacher looked at me and said: What have you been doing these days??
I think one of the keys to the success of this technique is that you get used to hearing your own voice in Spanish. If you also do it with a video of a teacher in front of you and you stop and repeat it, your mouth, your tongue and the muscles in your face change as you improve and practice your pronunciation in Spanish.
But it is a process, you need a lot of practice.
Oh! I forgot. If you like to sing… Sing songs in Spanish!
Learning the meaning of single words, using your usual translator for a single word, is something that many students do (including me because I do it with my English too), but it doesn’t really help much.
What’s useful is learning those words in context.
Most online translators already provide you with an example of use under the translation of the word, so that you understand it in the context of a sentence. I particularly like Linguee.
I also encourage you to memorise and practice what in English are called ‘chunks’: groups of words that go together and acquire a specific meaning.
For example, these days I am practicing in class with my beginner students the chunk ‘me da igual’ = I don’t mind.
Ideally, after looking at the meaning in isolation and seeing how it is used in a sentence, you would write or think of another different example for using this new word.
At this point, if you are an intermediate level student wondering how to think in Spanish and stop translating in your head, I would like to recommend that you use monolingual dictionaries, where you will find the definition in Spanish of the new word you are learning. I recommend the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy) dictionary, because with the use of these dictionaries your vocabulary will increase exponentially.
This is a piece of advice I give my students on the first day of class, during the trial class, when they are not yet my students.
For example, you can knit or crochet by watching a tutorial video in Spanish, you can take a yoga or Pilates class in Spanish, you can watch a history documentary in Spanish, you can cook with Peruvian, Colombian, Spanish, Mexican, Argentinian cooking channels…, you can learn to play your favourite musical instrument, the guitar, the piano… with a Spanish-speaking tutor, you can attend Latin dance classes with Spanish-speaking teachers…
The list is very long and includes, of course, the two hobbies par excellence: reading (read a good book in Spanish, adapted to your level) and watching TV series and movies (with Spanish subtitles, or if your level is very advanced, without subtitles).
Integrate Spanish in your daily routine with small things, it doesn’t matter if you’re in Scotland, Singapore or Japan.
For example, you can set your mobile phone to Spanish, write your grocery list in Spanish, if you write a diary, do it in Spanish, if you go for a walk with your dog, speak to him in Spanish: ¡Vamos Brady!
The last technique that I recommend if you want to know how to think in Spanish and stop translating in your head is perhaps the most important and difficult technique to put into practice and it is a skill that I work on with my students in my classes just as we work on grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary… And this skill is:
Learn to use the resources you have in Spanish.
It sounds simple, but it isn’t, because depending on your level of Spanish, this may involve simplifying your message to such an extent that you feel like you’re speaking like an 8-year-old child.
It’s okay, no problem, the goal is to communicate a message. You will enrich your sentences and conversations as you learn more Spanish, but for now, if you speak your native language like a 50- or 55-year-old adult, for example, but you speak Spanish like a 9- or 10-year-old child, that’s fine. Right now, this is what you can do with the resources you have in Spanish: just use them.
So, if your level of Spanish is still very basic, simplify what you want to say. Try to imagine that you are talking to a Spanish child (imagine that your teacher is also 9 or 10 years old) and you have to simplify the message.
Every language has its own idiosyncrasy, its own identity, and its own unique way of communicating. Trying to find similarities between two languages or trying to understand the reasons for the unique patterns that Spanish has, while sometimes helpful, is usually inefficient.
Embrace Spanish in all its fullness and start to fall in love with its peculiarities, with the past tenses, with the subjunctive, with the speed with which Spanish speakers speak…
Also, you don’t have to force yourself to think in Spanish all day, or even for an hour or two, it’s better not to force yourself. Just start slowly, talking to yourself in the shower for 3 – 4 minutes, listening to the Spanish radio or a Spanish podcast on the way to work or university, watching an episode of a Spanish Netflix series in its original version…
It may seem like a small thing, but the important thing is to start and be consistent.
And if you fancy integrating an hour of individual class a week into your routine, with an accredited native teacher, take a look at our catalogue of online Spanish classes or book a trial class with us.
The important thing is to take the first step!
