The four language skills that always get mentioned and discussed are: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Yet it seems to me a critical fifth means of utilizing language is always left out: Thought.

For most of us our brains are always full of back chatter, processing our desires, opinions, problems, and everything else that fills our daily lives. Be it from a simple knee-jerk reaction thought of, "Oh that person is attractive!" to more focused internal monologue on problem solving, thought fills our lives equally as as listening, reading, writing, and speaking do for many of us.

So why is "thought" often ignored when it comes to learning a second language?

Many people seem to think that it's a skill that will just come naturally as a byproduct of increasting their other skills in a language. After all, if one can speak in a language then they can think in that language, right? Thought is the internal counterpart of external speech, after all.
But I think many learners neglect this dimension to their language studies. Thought is a constant reinforcement of vocabulary and grammar: you cement those words and grammar points by actually using them to express yourself. And while one may not always have someone of their target foreign language to speak to, one can always practice the language internally by thinking about things in that language rather than in their native tongue as they usually do.

I just thought it was curious that on a forum very full of the sentiment of, "spend as much of your day as you can practicing Japanese!" that the simple truth that you can squeeze hours of extra practice in every single day simply by forcing yourself to think in Japanese doesn't get mentioned much.
There are plenty of times in which a student doesn't have the materials to study, or isn't in the situation to: driving, riding public transport, just sitting in class, taking a walk, lying in bed before falling asleep, taking a shower, etc.

All of it really adds up time-wise.

Yup, thinking in a language definitely helps ingrain the knowledge. When I was studying Spanish, I would always catch myself thinking, "How do I say this in Spanish?" Eventually, it got to the point where I could think almost entirely in Spanish. Unfortunately, that skill disappeared as I stopped using the language regularly.

With Japanese, I try to think as much as I can, but it's a lot more difficult than thinking in Spanish. It might be because of the different grammar. Swapping English and Spanish isn't that difficult since word order is similar, but switching from English to Japanese seems like trying to stop a train. If I try purposefully to think in Japanese, I end up with the words out of order and have to re-arrange them. This especially happens with longer thoughts/sentences. Simple stuff like, "This book is blue," or "There are a lot of kanji," come up automatically, but narrating entire internal dialogues is very slow and painful.

Learning a language seems to be a generally slow and painful process, though, so that's not a reason to give it up. For me, thinking in Japanese is kind of like learning to read kanji. At first, you're only able to pick up bits and pieces, but with enough time you'll be fluent.

頑張る！

I tend to daydream a lot and something I noticed is that recently I'm starting to daydream more and more in Japanese. Happens especially on days where i've spent prolonged periods listening to and or speaking Japanese. Sometimes it also just happens sporadically now.

I think it's a good sign that you're progressing well in a language when you can think in it. Also though, we tend to think mostly in our native language because we haven't yet developed the tools to express all of our thoughts fully in the language we're learning. You might like to practice as much as you know when you're starting out but having to always revert back to your native language to express things you don't know means you can't think fluidly in your target language until you've acquired enough of it. Which seems reasonable.

To an extent this is why I'm big on 'subvocalization' in Anki reviews, as a kind of tangent to thoughts on the importance of, well, thought... It's hard for me to remember past ramblings also related to this topic, but something else related is Brian MacWhinney's thoughts on 'resonance' in his theories, and I think you might want to read this section that describes it (on p. 30): psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/CM-general/unified.pdf

I've riffed on this in other comments but yeah, I forget. ;p

I believe that this skill can only be achieved fully once you've reached fluency in the language you're learning.

Aijin Wrote:(...)

I agree. However I also believe that your thoughts are basically molded by your environment. After watching House M.D. in french for half a day I had random thoughts in French for a while. Which is quite interesting because I can hardly speak any French at all.

I've begun questioning how much of our thoughts are truly our own.

After hearing, for example, 違うって numerous times, and understanding the situations in which it is used, the thought pops in my head in situations similar to one's in Japanese shows. The same thing happens after watching hours of British shows.

Are the words appearing because I think them? Or is it because the brain finds it situationally appropriate? How much of human interaction is free thought, and how much of it situationally appropriate mental script?

kazelee Wrote:I've begun questioning how much of our thoughts are truly our own.

Mmmmmmmm.... Very very very important question

kazelee Wrote:I've begun questioning how much of our thoughts are truly our own.

After hearing, for example, 違うって numerous times, and understanding the situations in which it is used, the thought pops in my head in situations similar to one's in Japanese shows. The same thing happens after watching hours of British shows.

Are the words appearing because I think them? Or is it because the brain finds it situationally appropriate? How much of human interaction is free thought, and how much of it situationally appropriate mental script?

If you're interested in this, then I recommend checking out Heidegger's essay "What Calls for Thinking/ What is Called Thinking" (the title has been translated in a few ways).

The monologue of one's mind is speaking just the same imo, although at some points it does take over and give you suggestions quite subconsciously.

Definitely true...

There are times throughout the day that I think in Japanese, but definitely hope to increase them.

The first dream in another language was definitely fun.

I'm looking forward to the first verbal "fight" in Japanese

So far when things get intense I revert back to english but need to change that.

I was trying to do Sudoku using Japanese numbers instead of English (I mean, I still used 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9, but I thought of them in the Japanese pronunciations).

It was difficult! I kept switching back to English automatically because it was easier and quicker. I had to really force myself.

I have lucid dreams in Japanese instead of English, even though I hardly know Japanese. Love the power of dreams.

I started thinking in Japanese when I started learning seriously, and it's certainly been a massive help in improving quickly. Sure it's rusty at the start, but soon you're constantly wondering 'how I do say such-and-such?', and you improve very quickly. I also stop and think about how to write what I'm saying every now and then. I used to pull out my phone every five minutes to see the writing of a particular word, now I can just instantly visualise how the word looks for a lot of what I'm thinking.

It took me a long, long, long time to start dreaming significantly in Japanese. In fact I found that sleeping was the biggest thing that stuffed up my learning; when I woke up I was completely out of my Japanese state of mind. Now I dream quite often in Japanese, listening while you sleep helps a lot.

Why not take your daily thought process and write them down as a daily journal. You can do this in English and then try your best to translate it into Japanese. You can then take the English and rough Japanese translation version to a Japanese friend or a service like http://www.lang-8.com and ask them to put it into more "correct" sounding Japanese for you. Then after all that, take those sentences and place them in an Anki file. That way you would have your own personalized Anki deck that would lead you into becoming a decent Japanese speaking individual in no time flat. Makes sense???

Edit: as crappy as it might sound, maybe using Google translate to give yourself a REALLY rough idea on how to say something. It is easier for a Japanese person to have SOMETHING to work with than to try to pull it out of thin air

I feel like thought is the same as speaking, except you're speaking to yourself. We don't use written English when thinking in English...

Yesterday my mom made Halo-Halo (a Filipino frozen dessert) for me and when I ate it I immediately thought "懐かしい～” and it took me forever to translate it to English. When my cousins asked me how it was, I said "It tastes like my childhood." Guess I couldn't think of "nostalgic" in time. =)

For the most part, without training, we don't have much control over our thoughts. Just sit down for five minutes and try not to think. It will quickly become obvious who is not in control of the thought process.

bodhisamaya Wrote:For the most part, without training, we don't have much control over our thoughts. Just sit down for five minutes and try not to think. It will quickly become obvious who is not in control of the thought process.

Aahhhh!!! We are all insane!!!

bodhisamaya Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:I've begun questioning how much of our thoughts are truly our own.

Mmmmmmmm.... Very very very important question

Yes, an interesting question indeed. To answer it first, we would have to define the term "your own thoughts". What would those be? How can you ditinguish them from somebody else's thoughts?

Aijin Wrote:The four language skills that always get mentioned and discussed are: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Yet it seems to me a critical fifth means of utilizing language is always left out: Thought.

Coincidentally, the other day (probably right around the time you started this thread), I was hearing a suggestion along what you're writing by Alexander Arguelles (famous YouTube polyglot). His advice was to "start small", maybe a minute or two at a time of thinking in one's target language, and build to longer periods.

I tried it a few times with Japanese, and found the exercise very interesting (and very hard).

But as luck would have it, a day or two later I heard a complementary piece of advice from yet another YouTube-famous polyglot, the amazing Moses McCormick (aka laoshu505000). His key insight (as I see it) is that language learners should invest as much energy as possible on practicing generating new, extended sentences in the target language with the words they already know. I think this is a brilliant insight because it goes directly against the self-defeating tendency of adult language learners to focus on what they want to say, but almost invariably cannot yet say. In effect his advice boils down to "focus on finding creative ways to make use what you already have, and don't worry over what you don't yet have." (Incidentally, this is a very child-like approach to language-learning. It is common for young children to latch on to new words and use them incessantly, as if trying out their growing repertoire, rather than expressing what's on their minds, were their main motivation for speaking.)

McCormick recommends, first, making and memorizing a list of the words and constructs in the target language that are used to extend simple sentences into long conversational streams. (He calls these something like "road runner keywords".) In English this list would include "and", "in addition", "besides", "also", "but", "so", "so that", "in order to", "therefore", "however", "nonetheless", "and not only that but", "I'm sure that", "I believe that", "If I remember correctly", "coincidentally", "probably", "possibly", "still", "and yet", "which reminds me that", "even though", etc., etc. And second, whenever one learns new vocabulary, to spend time actively making new extended sentences, incorporating the new vocabulary (along with previously learned vocabulary, of course). By "extended sentences" I mean sentences like "My teacher really likes this book (probably because he read it when he was very young), so he made us all read it, but I didn't like it at all." (And yes, these sentences often degenerate into run-ons, or are otherwise stylistically clumsy, but that's unimportant.)

I found that McCormick's sentence-generation practice makes Arguelles' suggestion much easier to carry out, and also a lot more fun.

Aijin Wrote:So why is "thought" often ignored when it comes to learning a second language?

Probably the reason that I would tend to ignore it, is because I don't typically think in words. I can and do certainly think *of* words, and think *up* words, as I'm doing now as I'm writing this, but words aren't something that typically come up in my mind spontaneously, unless I have a specific reason for thinking of words, such as recalling a conversation, reading a sign, or thinking of an email response.

I'm the opposite, my thoughts are a constant stream of words and little else.. once in a while a tiny flash of imagery will come up but not often.

infractus Wrote:I'm the opposite, my thoughts are a constant stream of words and little else.. once in a while a tiny flash of imagery will come up but not often.

Do these voices in your head ever tell you to do certain things? Just kidding.

I know what you mean, and I think that generally, if you can speak and write, you can compose thoughts in actual words if you wish. I find that that's not a terribly efficient mode of thinking, as the mind seems to have its own "language" that's neither words nor images or sound. If I were to consciously try to think more in words and sentences, that would be enough of an effort that I might as well spend that time doing conventional study with a book, pen and paper, or computer.

i've only ever had 1 full dream in japanese ever,strangely it made prefect sense.Although I can't wait till the day I start dreaming regularly in Japanese...

Mushi Wrote:

infractus Wrote:I'm the opposite, my thoughts are a constant stream of words and little else.. once in a while a tiny flash of imagery will come up but not often.

Do these voices in your head ever tell you to do certain things? Just kidding.

I know what you mean, and I think that generally, if you can speak and write, you can compose thoughts in actual words if you wish. I find that that's not a terribly efficient mode of thinking, as the mind seems to have its own "language" that's neither words nor images or sound. If I were to consciously try to think more in words and sentences, that would be enough of an effort that I might as well spend that time doing conventional study with a book, pen and paper, or computer.

Interesting that some people think in words and others don't. Most of my thoughts come out in words, even if the original thought was quick and wordless. You're right that it's inefficient, but on the other hand, I feel I won't remember what I thought as well if I don't put it into words.

Meanwhile, I rarely have dreams with actual speech, so I don't have many dreams in Japanese at all. Lol, I remember I was trying to ask God something in a dream, except I had to ask the question in Japanese.