This is a trick I taught my students the other day and that I’m sharing with all of my fellow language learners.
When you encounter a new word – a noun or a verb – don’t use a dictionary to look it up. Translating is the worst thing you can do as a language learner who is not specifically preparing to work as a translator. There is absolutely no need to link a word to another word in a different language. Link it to an image instead. This will help you get to a point where you don’t construct English phrases in your head and then translate them into the target language but just speak.
This is why I suggest you use Google Images. Link the word to an image in your mind.
Of course, you have to do this intelligently. For instance, we did this exercise in class where we used Google images to decipher a complicated sentence in Spanish about a nineteenth-century shepherd. In the sentence, the shepherd took his bag and a series of objects that were going to be useful to him while tending to his sheep. One of the objects he used had the same name as a brand of vacuum cleaners.
“What a weird guy this shepherd is,” a student said. “Why on earth would he take a vacuum cleaner to the fields with him?”
Clarissa's Blog 
That is such an interesting tip! I wish someone had told me that when I was first starting to learn foreign languages, as I was such a slave to vocab lists with translations!
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Vocabulary lists are not good because they create essentially passive knowledge. You might recognize the word you learned from a list when you encounter but the chances that you will actively use it are slim.
When I was learning Spanish, I found this old picture-based dictionary and it was immensely helpful.
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You are exactly right. This is how my experience was for a fair chunk of my Spanish language classes, until I reached higher-level classes that demanded a much broader active vocabulary that gave me a short, sharp shock.
If ever I manage to find the time to improve my French again, I will definitely be on the hunt for a picture-based dictionary (or dictionary app!).
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Nice words, picture-based dictionary is helpful
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This is practically useless in learning mathematical terms. Students who try this might never understand the difference between a composant and a component, for example, and certainly would not know which French word meant which.
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Another example that would have frustrated me is the Latin verb: ago, agere, egi, actus. We were taught that it meant “drive, do, discuss, live, or spend.” It quickly became obvious what it meant in any particular sentence, but I cannot imagine what “image” would have conveyed its meaning.
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This method only works for spoken languages that are currently very much alive, of course. Scientific terminology is a completely different thing.
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Being motivated is probably the most useful aid to learning a language. My high school French teacher managed to kill everyone’s motivation, turning his class into an excellent soporific.
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It is very important yet does not always help. I have had students who are passionately dedicated to learning a language but fail miserably. There are simply some people who cannot learn a language.
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I am skeptical that there are people who cannot learn a language, just as I am skeptical that there are some people who cannot learn mathematics. I think in both cases people simply have no conception how many hundreds or thousands of hours of compulsive work is required.
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Doing a teaching placement in maths was interesting. I was skeptical that are people who cannot learn math. Now I believe it is possible though it is much fewer than the amount who believe they can’t. And maybe these students can learn math too but they’d need more than their hard work and a typical teacher. They seem to have little concept of numeracy at 13 years old.
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Ask our man in Havana.
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I use google images in class when students ask me what a word means. It’s great, minus the times when looking up a particular word has inadvertently resulted in images not so appropriate for the classroom 🙂
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