I also find it acts as a constant speed bump in the flow of learning, and also makes it difficult to remember the feel and meaning of the vocabulary or grammar point being taught, which should be the absolute highlight of the sentence with the rest of it being easily comfortable to read at the appropriate level.
Instead I find myself constantly going off on tangents trying to figure out the construction of the example sentence to get a feel for how the bit I actually want to get comfortable with slots into it.
It doesn’t feel as structured as other tools or guides I’ve used. I know the ghost ship example, and it’s got to the point I’m subconsciously associating seeing that word in the English translation with what the answer is. It’s not a useful connection to make, but it’s what has naturally happened to me, just because the example sentence is above the level I’m at.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that a bit of vocabulary can have multiple semi-related secondary or less common meanings, with a clear primary one, but my introduction to using it is with some obscure secondary meaning, and my brain starts to associate it primarily with that, so when a new sentence pops up where the primary meaning or usage is required it doesn’t jump out at me.
From memory this happened with 交流 being learned at first for me as being associated with Alternating Current to the point it’s basically what I learned it as, and only later had to rewire how I thought about it to associate it with its more common/primary meaning.
It’s great that there are complex and alternative example sentences to see words used in, but I just feel they should come much later, or be level appropriate
Lastly learning a language, and learning to translate a language are two different things, and the example English translations that serve as the hint can have highlighted words meant to show which bit you need to figure out as things not shown at all in the vocabulary entry for it. After the answer is revealed it makes sense, but I wish there was some other way to offer the prompt that was perhaps closer to the literal translation, as that’s how I tend to think about speaking Japanese internally anyway. Even if the resultant English is then a bit clunky sounding.
It really is a very different skill for me personally to translate natural sounding sentences between two languages than it is just to think of them as seperate things linking to abstract thoughts. Add in some Americanisms to the English prompting sentences and sometimes it feels like I’m translating into my own English first before then trying to figure out how to say it in Japanese.
I now know why when I attended a Japanese language class in Japan, any use of English simply wasn’t allowed, and all the words and grammar I learned there really feel burned in compared to the ones I’ve subsequently learned by having them connect to an English word or grammar structure, instead of directly to a mental image or concept in my head, even if that meant a lot of gesturing from the teacher.
And it makes sense as that’s how we naturally learn a language. We don’t learn our primary one by relating it to an existing one and translating between them.
So I wish there was an option for a more ‘clunky’ literal translation as a hinting system. The nuance translation gets close.
Maybe I just need to get back into a classroom rather than trying to DIY it with apps.
I highly recommend this to everyone!!
