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We are
creatures of habit and we all know from our experience of life that
bad habits are the hardest to shake off. The only way to avoid bad
habits is not to acquire them in the first place. It is far easier
to resist getting into a bad habit that to re-educate your way out
of one. Where learning English is concerned, on of the very worst
habits you can acquire is mental translation when you want to say
or write anything in English. Whenever you do this, you first think
of what you want to say in your mother tongue and then attempt to
translate it into English. This immediately sets up a barrier to
communication. Say, for example, you want to cancel an appointment.
You first rehearse in your own language the phrase,
‘I would like cancel my
appointment’ and then you attempt to translate it
directly into English. You are immediately tonguetied because you
can not recall or do not know the English for
‘cancel’ and
‘appointment’. If you had
acquired the habit of thinking in English, the problem would not
arise because numerous other ways of expressing yourself would come
to mind. You might say, ‘I am sorry, I am not
free tomorrow’ or simply, ‘I am
afraid I can not come tomorrow’. Very often there
are not exact equivalents between languages, ‘I
have been invited to a party by John’ might prove
quite difficult or impossible to translate, whereas if you were
thinking in English, you might say, ‘John was
invited me to a party’ or ‘I am
John’s guest at a
party.’
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