How to Stop Translating As I Read

Japanese
#1

Hey all, I’m looking for some general advice on how to break this habit I’ve developed.

Recently, I’ve noticed that when I’m reading Japanese (particularly subtitles for TV but also to a degree manga or novels), I’ll often be translating in my head from Japanese to English. It also happens if I’m listening to a podcast or watching TV without subs, but to a lesser degree (maybe just because my listening is worse than my reading though…)

This wouldn’t be a huge problem, but I find it takes me out of the immersion, and I realise I’m never going to learn a lot of the nuances of how the language is used if I’m constantly thinking about it in English at the same time. After all, these things don’t ever match up 1 to 1.

As I’ve been learning, I’ve found myself more interested in the process of translation from Japanese to English and often spend time thinking about how particular sentences or words could have been conveyed differently when reading or watching something in English. I also review Japanese media released in English as my day job, so it’s one of those things that I find interesting due to that as well. I think that’s probably one of the big reasons I’ve ended up like this, and I recognise there’s a time and place for that, but it shouldn’t be constant.

On the whole, I don’t think this is a good habit to be in, and I’m wondering how others broke it? Or perhaps more, how did people start thinking purely in Japanese? Any advice gratefully received! :bowing_woman:

6 Likes
#2

I don’t know what level you are at now, but you made me realize that even as a intermediate level (taking N3 this December) I stopped doing that at some point.

I’ve been actively learning and immersing for about 10 months, and I remember the immersion being very difficult to do when I reached a point where easy content was too easy but I wouldn’t understand anything that wasn’t branded as easy.

I think a few things made it easier for me to just read or listen Japanese and process it in Japanese.

  • I focused on SRS everyday, meaning that even if I didn’t immerse, I still improved gradually so I didn’t lose motivation despite me being disappointed in not immersing at many points.
  • After finishing a core deck on Anki, I started actively sentence mining. I would read and focus on every subtitle extracting words in my anki deck. It’s really slow, I’ve got about 1500 words out of 2hr of content at the beginning because my deck was empty.
    What I’m focusing on is the fact that I paid attention to all these subtitles while watching the shows (an episode takes me 5x as long to watch on top of that) and I review those sentences regularly on Anki.
    And I want to emphasize the slowness of sentence mining is only at the start.
  • Finally, I still tolerate ambiguity, sometimes I watch anime or videos without subtitles because I’d need to torrent or use a VPN for that. In these cases there are some sentences I entirely don’t understand, but I usually still get 95% of the episode.

On the other hand, reading from articles or novels is another issue and I honestly just recommend doing daily practice on reading passages with Bunpro or Todaii for example based on your level.

I wonder if the fact you’re thinking so much about translation makes you subconsciously translate it, though I doubt that would outright prevent you from improving at processing Japanese in Japanese.

Nowadays, I immerse on a show easily every day and I’ve managed to get hooked on a video game that’s admittedly rather easy and features furigana, however having played it 30 hours in a rather short span, I feel that my reading speed has really increased and I only need to lookup words once every 2 textboxes on average as I remember the kanji despite the furigana.

2 Likes
#3

I realise now it probably would have been useful to mention what level I was in the initial post :sweat_smile:

I haven’t taken any of the tests, but I’m around low N3 I’d say. I’m level 41 on WaniKani and almost finished the N3 grammar deck here on Bunpro, but my knoweledge is broader since I have spent a lot of time picking things up here and there from the media I’ve interacted with.

I’ve been learning for a long time, but when I started out I was stupid and put off reading until I felt I knew a lot of vocab + grammar, which really set me back compared to where I would be otherwise. But I did start reading a few years ago and last year I made a big effort to listen to podcasts and watch unsubbed or JP subbed media and do a lot of that every day (it has really helped me improve so I regret holding off). Maybe I ultimately just need to immerse for longer and it will eventually correct itself.

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#4

From my experience, as long as you’re consistent, you’ll get over those obstacles one day.
Your habit of translating Japanese definitely falls into this as I would consider it a problem you have to solve with practice.
When you say you never read, do you mean you were only reviewing vocabulary on it’s own without example sentences?
All in all, I definitely agree focusing on reading is a great idea and if you manage to find an interesting way to work on analysing these sentences, it could allow you to break that habit.
Though analysing sentences can be tedious, that’s why I’d say to find a way to do it, which was sentence mining for me. I don’t have any ideas in mind, but if you have any methods suitable to your way of studying, don’t hesitate to give it a try.

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#5

Yep, I was just working through WaniKani / Bunpro and Genki at the time and was very hesitant to do anything else since whenever I tried I really struggled with anything that was unfamiliar and thought that it would get better on its own just through using those resources as opposed to just pushing forward and doing a lot of lookups or accepting I wouldn’t understand everything 100%. I understand that was a really bad way to learn in the beginning and I wasted a lot of time because of it.

#6

I don’t particularly think its a bad way to learn, it helped you build knowledge anyway.
It is good to always look into more ways to study things you lack without creating an overwhelming workload.
As I said, I sort of had this period at the beginning and probably went 2-3 months with minimal immersion.

1 Like
#7

This is exactly it. The more comfortable you get with reading Japanese, the less your brain will feel the need to translate what you’re reading. You’ll just start to intuitively understand the Japanese itself more and more over time.

5 Likes
#8

I’m going to recommend reading for fun. Manga or short stories might be best at the stage you’re at now. If you’re reading something really enjoyable, you’ll find yourself getting caught in the story more and translating less (in my experience at least). Murakami has several short story collections that are really good if you want something more difficult than a manga.

#9

What if you read content with 99% known vocab?
Do you still have this problem?
What if it is 95%?

If you do it even with 99% known vacav/grammar aka low n5 content then i have never encountered this problem myself and can not help.

But if you don’t do it, you are probably fine just learning forward.

You can think of it like:
How much do i translate when it is 99% known?
How about 95%?
What’s up with 80%?
If you find this problem grow the hardsr content is, you can just continue learning untill all things become 97-99% known, basically C1.

#10

I think you’re experiencing something called linguistic parasitism, basically when the referant in your mind (i.e. an image of an “apple”) is being accessed through your first language (or L1, the word “apple,”) by your L2 or L3 (translating りんご into “apple” and then understanding it that way). This weakens the ties between the language(s) you’re learning and what it refers to (the referant) since it’s taking the intermediary step through your first language to get to your end goal.

There’s some interesting research on this phenomenon, but since that’s not really accessible for most people I think the best thing you can do is just really leaning into immersion hard - it takes a lot of conscious effort to really stop this process, but the more you’re immersed and the more you’re reading the easier it gets. I also find that speeding up your reading and forcing yourself to not spend too much time on any single word can help you avoid translating.

If you wanna go really crazy, then what I used to do is read a passage once, quickly, then go back, read it slowly and write down any words I don’t understand without looking it up, try to infer the meaning, go back and read it again, then finally translate the words you didn’t know and make a custom deck out of them and really train your recall, focusing on knowing the word’s “vibe” more than the L1 meaning.

4 Likes
#11

Is there one in particular you’d recommend? I have always wanted to read Murakami’s stuff, but so far haven’t gotten around to any of it, even what’s been available in English.

Oooh. Yes that does sound like what’s happening to me, thank you! I appreciate the advice, especially about reading a passage fast and then going back. I will definitely try that, as well as not spending too much time on any single word so my brain doesn’t have time to start thinking about putting it into English. :slight_smile:

#12

Do you talk to people in Japanese? I find that this is when I feel I’m accessing and thinking in Japanese the most. Actively engaged when you’re responding and awaiting a response in real time.

I once saw a post the Japanese subreddit where one guy stated that he was essentially fluent in Japanese. He understood everything he read/saw, passed the JLPT N1, had no problem with any input, but the problem was that he automatically translated everything in English in his head, and did this throughout his learning path. So when it came time to speak, he couldn’t utter a single sentence. He could not communicate at all.

So if your goal is to only be able to understand Japanese books, media, etc, you’re fine. But if you’re looking to be able to communicate in Japanese, I would recommend speaking to natives which online, there are an endless amount of people willing to do so. Before you know it, 30 minutes would have passed during a good conversation and you might not even realize you’re speaking Japanese anymore, just speaking in general. Thats when you know it’s working.

1 Like
#13

hi, i’m a university language instructor and linguist. i often get this question from students. i always recommend they try input without the goal of learning, and without discipline. that is, read manga or watch a show without pausing your flow to look up unknown vocabulary/grammar meanings. just focus on the act of input for input’s sake. over some time, your brain will become more used to filling in the gaps on the fly using context clues and pre-existing information, just like you’ve got to do when you speak the language. slice-of-life content is particularly good for this.

i also agree with the above comment. even having just a few minutes of simple but natural conversation a day, out loud, can help you start thinking in the language rather than thinking in translation. and if you’ve nobody to chat with, talking to yourself about random topics off the top of your head is also acceptable :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#14

One other thing to try is to dump sentences you don’t understand into an LLM and have it explain it using a jlpt level you understand.

Here’s an example:

つと、そうだ。

ああ、なるほど。「つと、そうだ」ですね。これなら意味がだいぶ変わります。文脈次第ですが、文法的には以下のように分解できます。

⸻

:small_blue_diamond: 文の分解
1. つと
• これは 副詞「つと」 か、文語的な表現で「突然・すぐに」の意味を持つことがあります。
• 例：
• 「つと起きる」＝「突然起きる」「すぐに目が覚める」
• 古典や文学で使われる表現です。
2. そうだ
• 伝聞の助動詞で「〜だそうだ」＝「〜らしい / 〜と聞いた」と訳せます。
• 口語で「そうだ」とだけ言う場合も「そうらしい / そうです」と同じニュアンス。

⸻

:small_blue_diamond: まとめると

つと、そうだ ＝ 「突然、そうだ（と聞いた / 思った）」

•	口語では「ふと、そうだ！」のニュアンスに近いです。
•	「ふと気がついたらそうだった」とか、「思い出した、そうだ！」という感じの表現です。

⸻

:small_blue_diamond: 例文
1. つと、思い出した。今日は休みだった。
→ Suddenly, I remembered. Today is a holiday.
2. つと、そうだ、傘を持っていかなくちゃ。
→ Ah, that’s right, I have to take an umbrella!

⸻

:bulb: ポイント
• 「つと」＝「ふと / 突然」の意味で、文学的・少し古風な表現。
• 「そうだ」＝「そうだ！」＝気づき・発言の瞬間を表す。