Thinking in English

It's fairly common if the movies or stories were in English. Does the same happen to you when you watch a film or read a story in German? If so, then you must go and see a psychologist.

According to some Second Language Acquisition theories, learners holding a certain competence in the target language (English in this case) can go through this phenomenom as the language learned becomes part of his or her life (and mind). Have you ever dreamt "in English"? I have, and it's amazing what our minds are able to. Of course, I've dreamt of situations related to English affairs specifically, not every-day situations.

I agree with Mike. Your two suggestions works, for me at least.
So Nawal should really give it a try.

One day many years ago, I realized this from my observation: a Chinese friend of mine could speak so well because he had used English since his birth. He was exposed to only one language most of the time. He spoke English at home and at school. When he talked, he had to use English. When he read, he had to use English.

So, I did an experiment on myself:I spent three months exposing myself as much as possible to only English. I read English books and watched English TV programmes. I would purposely pretend that I needed information so that I could speak English to the staff at a bank or at a hotel reception. Sometimes I even rang up companies to inquire about their holiday packages or whatever products of theirs. All these were done to make myself practise more. With my family, of course, I can only speak 'Hakka' (a Chinese dialect), as usual.

I was about 20 then. But I had no idea about the differences between Mandarin and English. I would often think about an idea in Mandarin and then translate it to English. When speaking Mandarin, I don't have to worry about tenses, singular/plural nouns, gender, etc. But when I thought in Mandarin and spoke in English, my sentences were funny and bound to be misunderstood. And many a time, when I thought about a man, I said 'she', and a woman, 'he'. (In Mandarin, 'he' and 'she' have the same pronunciation.) So I guess as an English speaker, I was only as proficient as an English-speaking child, if not worse. So I started with children's books. I think it was called the Ladybird's Series. Each book has lots of illustrations and perhaps you can see only 10 short sentences in about 50 pages. The advantage is that when the sentence is simple enough, you can pay more attention to the grammar instead of looking up words in dictionary. For example, when you read 'She is a beautiful girl.' you will know that with 'she', you have to use 'is', not 'am' or 'are'.

By the end of the third month, I could read novels. I remember my favourite author then was Graham Masteron, a writer of horror stories. And I could speak more confidently, at least with fewer incidents of letting 'he' slip out when I meant 'she'.

(Oh, I use monolingual English dictionary, too.)

(I never think in English or Mandarin when counting (mentally), it is much much faster in Hakka.)

Ryan

I'm an active trillingual. What I ussually  do is imitate how native speakers talk, wethever listening to people,music, watcing movies,reading...

I try to forget my mother thongue grammar when I speak english .       So I concentrate in employ all I have learn at english.

  

 

 

Wow, quite a lot posts here, hot topic

What I think in understanding "Thinking in English" is that, whenever you try to use English to talk to somebody, you only can remember English, and not rely on any other languages to substitute or "mental translated" English.

Hi Jay,

Welcome! First please allow me to differ. I won't say it's impossible. However, I think the person must have a strong fundamental in Eng. and he must have perseverance and will power. I work with many colleagues of foreign origins who understand and can write Eng. relatively well. But they have a slight problem with spoken Eng. This I believe it's due to the fact that most people in ESL category do not process thoughts in Eng. in their normal daily lives, except when they have to compose of something in Eng. in their own privacy. When thoughts and idea are put through a translation process, the intended meaning may be comprimised. Moreover,  spoken Eng. requires instantaneous response and the luxury of privacy to compose and translate is taken away.  How do I know? So happened, Eng. is not my first language. I went through the same agonizing process of learning like everyone else. But I recognized the problem and so I slowly started to train my brain to think and process thoughts in Eng about 10 years ago. I realized the only way to use the language like a native is to learn to think like one. It took a lot of hard work, strong will power and practice. I believed I have acquired the ability to command Eng as well as my “second nature”. Now I can easily switch my brain to operate between my native environment and Eng. setting.  I won’t say it’s easy but not entirely impossible either.