How to Think in Russian Instead of Translating

Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

The pause everybody can see

There is a particular silence that happens about a second and a half after somebody asks a learner a question in Russian, and everybody in the room hears it except the person producing it.

Not a long silence. Long enough that the person asking notices it, decides it means something, and usually starts helping. One of my students described the whole of his first year in a distributed team as that pause repeating. I know exactly what I’m doing and I can’t make it go faster, he said. He had read the advice about not translating, and it had not helped him once. Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

Why the English arrives first

Nobody translates on purpose. It happens in the gap between the question and the answer, and telling somebody to stop does not shorten the gap.

English is not competing for your attention in any deliberate way. It is simply faster, and it wins on speed the way a shorter road wins, without anybody choosing it.

You have said your English sentences hundreds of thousands of times, in every mood and at every speed and in rooms where it mattered, and by now they come out of you already assembled rather than built. Your Russian ones exist as parts you have to fit together, and fitting takes time you do not have while somebody is looking at you.

That is the entire mechanism, and it needs saying plainly: this is not a discipline problem, and it is not a sign that you are doing any of it wrong.

My first winter here I rehearsed a two-line exchange with a pharmacist on the walk over, both parts, and she opened with something I had not budgeted for. Everything I had prepared went, and what came out was worse than if I had prepared nothing. What follows from it is unexpected: you can’t stop translating by deciding to, because the decision doesn’t make the Russian any faster. It only makes you aware of the pause while it happens, which is worse.

What changes it, judging by the people it has happened to

The ones who stop translating have almost never been trying to stop. They were doing something else entirely, and the translating fell away as a side effect of it.

What they have in common is that certain phrases stopped being assembled and started arriving whole. Not vocabulary. Phrases: the four or five words that always travel together, stored and retrieved as a single object rather than assembled out of parts each time somebody asks you something. She had said that phrase perhaps two hundred times before it happened, and none of those two hundred were study: she said it out loud, to actual people, at the start of actual calls, in the one situation the phrase belonged to and nowhere else. That is the difference between knowing a phrase and having it.

The mistake that keeps people translating for years

Learning words instead of chunks, which is what almost every course and every app quietly encourages, because words are countable and phrases are not.

Fluency is not faster assembly. It is having fewer things left to assemble.

Bricks. Not a wall, and not a plan for one. Each one requires a sentence built around it every time. I know six hundred words and I still can’t talk, one student said, as an accusation against himself. He was not lazy. He was carrying six hundred separate things. Somebody who has fifty phrases and thirty words will out-speak them in an ordinary conversation, because most of what gets said in a day is not original at all. It is the same few dozen moves, in my experience, and a fluent speaker is mostly recognizing which one is needed. How do I say is the question that keeps a learner translating. What do people say here is the question that gets them out of it, and they are not the same question at all. Immersion helps, but not for the reason it is usually sold, and the difference matters enough to be worth separating out. Hours of Russian around you do not build phrases; hours of Russian you have used do, and the difference decides whether a year abroad produces fluency or a very good ear. Repetition of the same situation does the work. The same greeting to the same person, the same coffee order in the same place, the same three sentences at the start of every meeting. It looks like stagnation, and it is the opposite. That pause shortens without any announcement at all, over weeks rather than days. Nobody notices the day it stops, which is the same way the fear of speaking goes: later, by absence.

The year my own translation reversed

I didn’t expect this to happen to me at all, and certainly not in the direction it did.

Some years after moving, I caught myself building a Russian sentence out of an English one. Not a rare word, an ordinary phrase, something about scheduling. The English had arrived first and I was translating it back into my own language, badly, in my head, while a Russian speaker waited.

It lasted about a month, and it frightened me considerably more than it should have, because I had spent years telling students that a first language is permanent furniture and here was mine arriving second. What it taught me was that none of this is about which language is yours. It is about which phrases you have used recently, in situations that mattered, out loud.

A language you own can still be slower than a language you use daily.

For a while I said the thing about scheduling wrong, and then stopped saying it wrong, on no particular day, the same way anybody does. At Palme School we teach adults online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. You can book those through the button above, and there are printable materials for learners in our resource library.

Frequently asked questions

How do I stop translating in my head when speaking Russian?

Not by deciding to, because the decision does not make the Russian arrive faster. What shortens the pause is having whole phrases stored as single units, which comes from saying the same ones repeatedly in real situations.

How long does it take to start thinking in Russian?

It arrives in patches rather than all at once, usually first in the situations you repeat most, and most people notice it retrospectively rather than on the day.

Does immersion make you think in a language?

Only the part of it you use. Hours of Russian around you build comprehension; hours of Russian coming out of your mouth build the phrases that remove the pause.

Is translating in your head always bad?

No, and it is unavoidable at the start. It becomes a problem only when it is the whole method at a stage where some phrases should have stopped needing assembly.

Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · Conversation school · Free materials

Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.