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Oleg's avatar

Having worked as a translator for 6-7 years, I can attest that translation is super useful in getting a language "under your skin". It's different from just talking a lot, because you get the time and space to really interrogate how phrases, expressions and weird grammar twists work in action and what they actually mean.

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Lou's avatar

I love this! We always speak about learning languages, but it's so exciting to realise understanding, speaking, translating, etc are all different skills we can choose to practise.

Although I didn't think about it as "translating", I do use this type of prompt to expand my vocabulary: "how would I say this in Korean?".

It sparks a bunch of fun questions like "does my first intuition mean the exact same thing? Are there cultural differences? Nuances in the feeling of the sentence?" - I'll think about all the benefits you wrote about!

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