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Anecdotally, I've encountered people online who consider language learning closely related to translation. This took me by surprise, since I consider learning foreign languages to be weakly associated with translation (maybe translation could function as a form of scaffolding to get early learners started), and if anything, I feel the student should avoid translation, and the advanced student in particular should use monolingual dictionaries.

The thing is, I'm learning Chinese (Mandarin) as a native English speaker, which are fairly distinct languages. But maybe if I were learning, say, German, translation skills might be more relevant.

Question: Is translation a more relevant skill when learning a foreign language more closely related to your native language?

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  • Use whatever tools help you to understand/learn/remember the words. For example, to learn the French word "pierre", I could just write down the translation 'stone'. But in this case, if I look at the etymology (in a monolingual dictionary), I see that it comes from 'petra', which I can recognize as related to the word family "petrify", so in this case that's more memorable for me than a simple translation. Of course it takes longer to look up etymologies and monolingual explanations, so that's sometimes a disadvantage in some contexts (e.g. you've got a lot of words to look up).
    – Brandin
    Aug 22 at 6:52
  • Translation unless used by a professional trying to learn another related language is useless to students. The translation methods of language learning are widely discredited.
    – Lambie
    Sep 2 at 17:01

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