#HOW TO MAKE ENGLISH TO ENGLISH DICTIONARY ANKI HOW TO#
When you put this word into Anki, you need to figure out how to remind yourself of the meaning of the word without any English.įor ‘la maison’, this is pretty easy. We’ll discuss frequency lists and choosing your vocabulary later on, but to go back to our house example, if you’re walking along the street and see a house, and realize that “house” is not yet in your French vocabulary, you will need to go home and look up “house” in a French-English dictionary in order to get “la maison”. You use English to find the words you need. The trick is to use English as a temporary crutch, and wean yourself off of it as soon as possible, usually within a couple of months (although you may still need that dictionary from time to time when writing about new topics). You may not even have the alphabet you need if your first word in Russian is “Здравствуйте!”, you don’t yet have any of the tools you need to learn what that means, and you can bet you’ll be running to an English-Russian dictionary. You need some language to get more language, and if you’re an absolute beginner, you don’t have the language you need. Translation is too slow – you need words that come instantly to your tongue. It involves thinking about the existence of a dog in the house and immediately thinking “Est-ce qu’il y a…”. Speaking French involves looking at objects and knowing, instantly, how to describe that object in French. Why trainĭoing this allows you to instantly think the word “maison” as soon as you see the picture, and that’s your goal, isn’t it? You’re not trying to teach yourself to be a translator, you’re trying to teach yourself to speak French. You can make your translations more and more complex, and you can get very fast at them, but it will never be as fast or as fluent as simply thinking in the language. “Is it that it there has a dog in this house?”. “Est-ce qu’il y a un chien dans cette maison?” translates to Even with a simple question like “Is there a dog in that house?”, you will run into serious issues.
Since speaking French is a bit more complex, your translating will only get you so far.
If speaking French was a matter of being shown a picture of a house and you having to regurgitate ‘la maison’, then you now speak French. Then, if all goes well, you think “the word for house in French is ‘maison’. Two, let’s look at what happens when you see this:įirst, you think “house”.
One, you’ll most likely forget (but you can force yourself to remember using Anki, although I’ve had students who didn’t take my No Translation advice and found that they had serious difficulties remembering the translations for certain words even with Anki).