| Be careful with online translators. They often warp the meanings of things. I find them most useful using this process. First read the text (a few sentences) in the foreign language. Then run it through the translator, because you can only understand half of it and there are some key words that have you lost. Read the English translation keeping in mind that it is WRONG. However it will have clues about the structure of sentences, the meaning of unfamiliar words, etc. In this step you are not learning the foreign language, you are learning some POSSIBLE solutions to the problem of understanding the text. Now go back and read the foreign language text from the top. You will find that miraculously your brain can now read and understand it almost 100%. Occasionally you will be forced to check the dictionary for a word that suffers from the problem discovered in 1966 when researchers ran "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" through and English-Russian translator and then back again through a Russian English translator. They got back "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten". I also used this back and forth translation to check my Russian letters before I sent them. I wrote in Russian without a dictionary, then translated it back into English with an online translator. I often found words where I had chosen the wrong one of several possibilities. Nowadays when people ask me "What is the X language word for Y?" I say, it cannot be translated. In general it is not possible to translate an English word into another language or vice versa. That is why I recommend keeping phrase lists rather than word lists because you get a bit of context which is what determines meanings. When you use a dictionary and there are 10 possible translations for "find", look up each of the possibilities in the foreign language section and you will not only find the best word to express what you mean, you will also learn how fuzzy a lot of our English words are, and don't ask me about "get" and "put". |