One of the greatest joys of studying the language is when you begin to think in it instead of translate everything. Many people assume that thinking in Japanese is something that only happens for advanced students, but it can actually happen sooner than you would think. It doesn’t need to be perfect thinking in Japanese. It just has to get your brain into the habit of recognizing phrases and not constantly translating everything into your native tongue.
For most students, translating things is their first step of learning Japanese. When they read a phrase, they translate it into English and then they understand what it means. This works, but this is where your Japanese thinking is not going as fast as you want it to be. The way you start thinking in Japanese more naturally is by slowly replacing translation with direct understanding. So instead of thinking, this means this in English, you think this situation calls for this response.
One way to start thinking this way with Japanese is just by repeating. If you repeatedly hear or read the same phrase over and over again in different contexts, your brain slowly starts to see these as meaning units rather than individual words. For example, you will begin to recognize greetings and simple questions, and these will start feeling less like you are having to translate and more like a phrase that you can just use in the moment. So this is the very beginning of thinking in Japanese, not understanding grammar rules but becoming familiar enough with simple phrases.
Another piece of this is not having to understand every word in a phrase to understand what is being said. As a student, you probably tend to give up and stop trying to understand when you can’t make sense of all the words you are seeing. However, your thinking can still be a more direct Japanese thinking if you allow yourself to continue understanding, even if you don’t understand every single thing in the phrase. As a student keeps exposing themselves to this type of input over time, you will start to get a natural instinct and you will start understanding more and more naturally without translating every sentence into English first. This can’t be memorized and rote learning, this has to be done through natural exposure.
This type of input, this natural exposure to the language, plays a huge role in the way that you begin to think more naturally. So not only will you get input that allows you to hear the same phrases in different contexts, you will also start to hear Japanese conversations in the background while you work or while you do other things. Your brain slowly will begin to pick up the different rhythms and different tones that are used in the language, and over time the language will stop sounding like you are trying to translate separate words into a single concept. It will start sounding like whole phrases that you understand, which is a big step toward natural thinking in the language.
At JapanLangCore, our goal is to provide students with this type of input. We focus on providing students with consistent, structured learning. We focus on learning vocabulary and grammar in a way that students can naturally pick up patterns in the language rather than trying to study vocabulary and grammar in isolation. We try to give students examples of what is being said in real contexts so that they can begin to understand the natural thinking in the language rather than thinking that it is just translating every sentence into English and memorizing vocabulary and grammar rules.
So the goal is that you will slowly stop asking yourself, how do I say this in Japanese and you will start recognizing how Japanese says it. And this process can begin a lot sooner than you would think if you give it consistent, structured exposure to the Japanese language.