"I translated all the words, but I still don't understand!"

Agreed, love this method and I think Harry Potter is such an excellent choice/recommendation, though I would add the caveat that if you're a complete beginner then it's too difficult for you and you should probably try some children's books instead, that's what I tend to recommend to them.

Cheers,
Andrew

Hi Andrew, Hi David,

the bigest problem to understand what you translated is meaning behind. I remember often about what happend in my workbook, what I had to use for my lessons in Krakow. I translated the sentence and didn't get the real meaning, because german an polish have a other structur. In same other cases it was a phrase what I didn't know (how shoud I!). Until December I have visited a polish course here in Gelsenkirchen / Germany, so I could ask my polish teacher. Then she told me about the meaning of the sentence or phrase.

Regards,
Olaf

Great post David. The note about reading difficulty is really important I think. Finding the right level of reading is important. You want to be challenged, but not bogged down. You want to get drawn into the story, not into the dictionary. And so the hard work comes in finding the right book - for you. But once you find it . . . hang on!

Aaron

[...] "I translated all the words, but I still don't understand!" | LinguaTrek From www.linguatrek.com - Today, 8:43 PM [...]

Hi David,

I too am using Harry Potter to help myself improve my French. I am just about finished with the first one.

I absolutely say that it would be too difficult for a beginning French student, but once you have achieved a certain level, then it is a great way to learn and improve vocabulary, grammar understanding, etc all in a very natural way.

Of course, anything that is of interest to the learner is the best, so Harry Potter may not be the ticket for everyone.

For example, I love skiing, so today I was really interested to tell my French language coach about my recent ski trip, and I realized I didn't have enough of the vocabulary words I wanted to use, so we started searching on sites to figure out some words to use and it was really fun - and I learned a bit about skiing in France.

I look forward to reading the ebook and checking out your site.

Got here via FB post by Aaron at The Everyday Language Learner.

Thanks.
Lisa

Heh, tell me about difficult content. My book of choice was A Game of Thrones. At the time I started reading, about three months ago, I knew about ten polish words at best.
I know the content I picked is way above my level but maybe I'm too proud to give up because I'm still reading it with the same motivation. That and the awesome story :)

For Romanian, a GREAT first book is Habarnam. It has 30 several page chapters. It was written by a Russian but translated into Romanian. It has an English translation easily found as a pdf.

There is a second volume in Romanian but not in English, but after working through the first Habarnam book, you won't need the English anymore. There is also a third volume, but Russian only.

A group in Romania has recorded the first two volumes (around 9 hours of audio) in a project for blind children. The text and recordings (in Romanian) can be freely downloaded from their site http://gramo.ro/habarnam/. The site is in Romanian, but beginners can easily navigate it by having Google translate the page.

Hi David,

Very interesting post. I realized something when studying English: TV shows with a "learned" (or scholarly) language were much easier to understand, from a foreign viewpoint. They're more literal, and almost don't use slangs. I practiced with House, M.D. show, and this gave me confidence in listening. TV shows like "Friends" or "How I Met Your Mother" are much more difficult to understand (again, from a foreign viewpoint).

I'm learning Hungarian and answer on your question is yes.
Actually Hungarian is one of those languages that you can't understand just by translating every word...grammar is so complicated.
I tried the same with other languages and it worked sometimes, but not with Hungarian and sometimes it makes me frustrated because even when I get the translation of the word I don't have it in normal form.So I don't know what particular ending mean...really complicated stuff.

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Obviously each language has its own structure and its own way of express a vision. That's the reason why by learning a new language you acquire a new form of understand the reality :D

I'd never thought of reading a book in another language to learn that language! That's such a great idea! It is a bit hard, though, to get all of the context and sentence structure learned, like you said. It certainly requires other studying, other than reading the book.

I think it would be easier for me to use movies and tv to learn than to read a book. Or maybe start with younger children's books.

I love sports and as a result a lot of my reading is online sport websites. A lot of smaller clubs do not tend to have an English version so I try to read it first and if I struggle with any words then use the translate facility.

"I translated all the words but I still don't understand!"

I'm learning Turkish and I get this problem regularly. There's so many parts of the language where a direct translation just doesn't work; the logic of the grammar is totally different to English and Latin based languages. Plus the same word, or word construction, can have totally different meanings.

Here's an example

"içme suyu"

Which means "drinking water". Fine, you might think. Except it also means "don't drink the water"! So the same 2 words can have totally opposite meanings, you can only get the real meaning from the wider context.

Great fun!

Hey, i love the methodology behind this method it makes alot of sense. I have learned Esperanto this way fairly quickly without realising i was using this method! However now i am learning korean and i cant find any audiobooks for my favorite novels. I can barely even find any intresting authentic korean audiobooks. Recently i bought a TTS(Text-To-Speech) software called SVOX(for my andriod phone) and suposidly the voices are suposed to sound natural soundning. I listened to the english voices and besides the roboty-rise and falls of words it never fails tp spew out the correct prononciation. I also listened to the korean version and it sounds pretty natural(to me) however it reads text with weird and abrupt haults and im wondering whether or not i should use it? Do you think it would be okay to use if i cant find any audiobooks? How do you think this would effect my progress? Thanks in advance.

Very interesting stuff from what I've read on your blog,
and I must say that I can't agree with your methods any more.
In fact, most of my writing skills in English come from the Harry
Potter book series when I read them as an 8-year old. Even though English is my native language, seeing these sentences so many times, Something I will always regard as remarkable happened. Things just simply "sounded right." It's hard to explain. It is almost exactly what you explained when learning Polish. I just have one crucial question to ask,
At what point did things begin to "sound right" or "feel right"
when you would say or write them?
In other words, how many pages or entire books did you have to read where you knew by instinct the construction of a sentence (almost any sentence)?
Oh, by the way, I lied, I have another question,
Are you going to try a second language using the same method, if so, which language?
Thank You,
you have just confirmed a method I wanted to try out because of my success in learning English by reading, A LOT.....
XenoLingvo

Hello,

I agree with you that for learning language Interest, Goal and Motivation is required. Without these no one can learn Frech , German, Spanish or any language.

maybe I am stupid, but Harry Potter has some strange words in English, even English people do not know ...
so learning a language with some chidlren or real books should be fine ...

Hi.

I think if you don't know about the required language any tools can't help you to translate and understand. If you are trying to do this but you had no knowledge about the language than you are wasting your time.

In my opinion if you know about a language than you don't need any tools and according to me there is no tool that work proper as needed.
If any please tell me ....