What can I do to stop translating in my head? - Intermediate Spanish 

A perfect example of this is using super basic phrases. I'm sure anyone who can understand this video, when greeted with "Hola, ¿como estás?" doesn't think to themself "hi, how are you?". When you here that spanish phrase, you immediately know what it means, you immediately connect it to it's meaning, without going through your native language. That's what happens over time with more and more phrases, words and grammar points. You will eventually be able to understand it all without translating, if you truly internalise and "acquire" the word/phrase!

I was so happy when I first realised that I wasn't trying to translate in my head as I was watching your videos. It took a long time though, I was coming up for 300 hours of CI before I got to that point and it felt like a very gratifying breakthrough. Sometimes I have days where I feel like I don't understand as much as I did last week but I used to be tired after 20 minutes of content and now I can enjoy watching things in Spanish for an hour or two a day without losing concentration.

For me, when I went to South America for 5 weeks a few years ago, my brain got so tired of translating in my head all the time that I was exhausted. At that point, I wasn't trying very hard to listen and suddenly, I was understanding people much more easily. I'm sure it's different for everyone but once you hit that point where you are relaxed/exhausted, you'll get it.

I just wanted to share that, for me, going with harder content is actually useful for this. When it goes too quick for me to stop and translate, I’m really just listening out for everything being said and hoping to catch the context and meaning. I then take that back into easier content and usually I’ve had a bit of a jump in listening comprehension because of it. Whether it’s ‘optimal’ is questionable, but it certainly works for me to just get my brain to focus on listening to Spanish.

I've found just listening to a lot of Spanish on this channel has fixed it. It's sort of just a natural function of the brain with enough exposure to a concept.

I had two problems that are described in this video that I realized early on. 1. When I'd hear a word I didn't understand, my brain would short circuit and I would fixate on that. The rest of the words would just fly by and I felt like I was playing, "catch us". 2. A similar problem where I'd recognize a word that I'd previously learned. I'd have the same short circuit response because I'd be happy that I recognized it. That became the focal point. The only solution to this that I've found is that I have to kind of relax my mind a bit. Almost like if you take off your glasses or just unfocus your eyes so that things become blurry, you can still get a general sense of what you're seeing but you're not seeing anything distinct. You're seeing things "in context" and in relation to one another. Doing this with listening helps a ton because you're trying to focus on the overall message.

Me encanta esta serie. Tú eres un maestro de verdad, y esto es la boda perfecta de la práctica y la teoría. Eres un genio, Pablo. Muchísimas gracias por enseñarme este hermoso idioma, y por revelar el secreto de adquirir cualquier otro.

Good advice here, but I would love to see a version of this video done by a guide who HAS struggled with translating in their head, and how they overcame it.

Yo got me with the broma Pablo, good one lol😂

A few months ago it just clicked and i noticed i was able to just understand at a much higher level without directly translating. (At least with intermediate youtube videos)Now i can practice with less headaches at that level. My routine is to do difficult challenging compression. Then step down to something more basic and try to take in most of the words and conjugations. The more you make breakthrough steps the less headaches u get and more you start to really understand

The funny thing is that after awhile with certain words I don't translate anymore, but that's words I've known for awhile like poco, I don't think small in my head, I think "poco" and pero, I don't think "but" in my head anymore but I think "pero". but with new words I definitely translate in my head at first.

Buenos consejos! Muchas gracias Pablo. Me encanta tu canal. Este es mi problema. Estoy avanzada en gramática, leer y escribir , PERO en comunicación verbal estoy intermedia baja porque yo traduzco en mi mente. 😫 It’s a hard habit to break and it definitely is stunting my growth with communication!!

Pablo, empecé a ver tus vídeos casi hace 1-2 años y ahora puedo entender tus vídeos más difíciles sin ningún problema y puedo hablar con nativos etc. Estoy muy muy feliz, ahora hablar español se siente natural y no estoy traduciendo ninguna palabra en mi cabeza. El input en español casi todos los días fue muy importante por esto. Estuve en España y no tuve ningún problema para entender el idioma en los restaurantes, el mercado etc. Obviamente que no he usado solo tus vídeos pero al principio me ayudaron muchísimooo y recomiendo tu canal de RU-vid a todas las personas que quieran aprender español más eficiente y fácil.

I absolutely love your videos about language learning, please make more :)

I learned a bit of Spanish (& Latin) in school, so when I first learned about comprehensible input I realized I had this problem. One thing that helped me was: don't ~try~ to understand. I tried to just listen, pay attention, but otherwise make no effort, & I would either understand automatically & effortlessly, or I would just not understand. I avoided as much as I could, any kind of thinking or trying to figure anything out. (This was based on Marvin Brown's extension of Krashen's monitor concept to include any & all conscious analysis of language. Anything that feels like trying is by definition conscious, & is therefore the action of the monitor, not unconscious acquisition. Unconscious acquisition doesn't feel like anything - we perceive language as meaning itself, with no intermediary, just like it feels in our native language.) With Chinese I have never done any formal study, so even though my level is very rudimentary, what little I do know I never translate. As you say, the real solution is comprehensible input. And as Marvin Brown argued, learning that way from the start avoids unhelpful 'training scars' later.

I'm loving these thumbnails!

Hi Pablo, congradulation on 90K subscribers.🎉🎉🎉

Love your content Pablo. I think you could really expand your offering if you created an app that allowed people to passively listen to your content. That could be a game changer

What helps me with this problem is try to think in pictures. So if someone says "gato" i think of a picture of a cat versus the english word "cat"

What would be the challenges with learning via comprehensible input? My guess is access to appropriate material and having enough time… How do you decide to start a new language? When you’ve reached a high level & can speak in the first one? How do you maintain your languages? Also, I think you’re learning Chinese, right? Do you know some good resources for Mandarin input?

Buena Idea.

I've been listening to this stuff for some several hours. Right now I just have a free account and I don't always log in. But it seems to me the words and phrases I understand are because of words and phrases that I already know. That and the fact that you speak slowly and clearly. I just got through reading a transcript of what speakers were saying on LingQ, and even with the words in front of me I couldn't make out what one male speaker was saying. So far I don't think I've learned a thing while listening to sounds I can make no sense of and don't have a transcript for. Occasionally your gestures will provide a clue, but even then I don't remember the new word. So . . . ????

Lol you really got me with that joke

One thing is to stop translating when receiving input, but the other is to start speaking without first "consulting" it with your native language.

Lol me watching this as a translate it in my head

This is all well and good, but what happened to the pretty hammock? :)

No sé si tengo este problema, pero es muy facil te entender. A veces, aumento la velocidad del video

Could you talk about the headaches?

Anyone else like WHAT THE F.... at 5:11 ???? 😂😂😂😂

I know this is a random comment, But I have faith in this idea so bear with me for a moment. I think it would be great if there was a page on the Dreaming Spanish website, where you could send video ideas, and then if someone on the Dreaming Spanish team was struggling for ideas (or something along those lines) they could read the bin of video ideas in the Dreaming Spanish video ideas bin to make the video and then, Make the video? Obviously, this is just a suggestion from a person who has never run a business even remotely close to what dreaming Spanish is. So moral of this comment is I think more viewer interactivity would be nice. Anyway, whoever is reading and listening to comments in the comment section or on the Dreaming Spanish subreddit is already doing a very good job.

I dont think there is advice for this. You just need to keep learning. Reading everyday and speaking when possible will take care of this problem

I think this method generally makes good sense. However, I wish Pablo would use the familiar 'Tu' form of 'you' in his videos. . I understand why Pablo uses vosotros as he's talking to multiple people but normally there's is only one person at a time watching it. When watching this video, it's like he's sitting across the table and you're having a private lesson, one to one. Although it probably feels right from his perspective to use vosotros, it doesn't feel right to me, watching on my own, to hear it. I'm pretty sure also, that you use and hear the familiar form far more in everyday conversations and therefore would attune the ears for a greater proportion of natural situations.

No sé si traduzco en mi mente o no - creo que muchas veces sí, pero a veces no? Estoy confundido. Algo parecido sucede alguien más?

"input comprehensia...adios" 🤣

Es dificil para mi, pero dejar de traducir en mi mente en ingles es muy complicado

cheat code: when you're french and 80% of the words being used are literally french words + 'o' or 'a' 😅

esa broma me tomó 😂

Translating in your head ... ? Trust me - that's 100% NORMAL when you're first learning another language. No worries whatsoever - Eventually your skills will increase to the level where it takes virtually no effort to comprehend what's being said. But that often takes spending months full time in the nation of your choice which speaks the language. If your language of choice is Spanish, and if you try to learn it by hanging out with Latinos in the USA, well ... Just beware that the Spanish of many Latinos in the USA often has very little resemblance to a full blooded dialect of the sort which you'd be exposed to in say, Monterrey Mexico, far away from the border towns.