How to think in a foreign language

This is a guest post by the author of Life by Experimentation, Zane, who quantifies the path to
self-improvement. He creates real-life experiments to assess everything from sleeping less to
traveling cheaply in order to live a more productive and skilful life. He speaks Mandarin
Chinese, Spanish, French and Arabic with varying degrees of fluency.
Recently a friend asked me how long it would take before she started thinking in French. My
response was a week or so. She was shocked (and understandably so). We worked on it
together and within a week, we were both thinking in the language despite it still being quite
new to us.

Thinking in a foreign language is an important goal that brings you one giant step closer to
becoming fluent. There is also the fact that language and culture are intertwined, and thinking
in your target language is an essential part of being able to connect with the people you are
trying to get to know.
It is not necessarily easy to think in a new language (especially if you have never done it
before) but it is still simple there is no magic here. First time language learners often believe
that if they study long enough and hard enough they will eventually just start thinking in the
target language, as if a switch had been flipped. This is how I approached it the first time
around and it did work eventually kind of.
Now I know better. There are two essential parts of thinking in a language: context
and conditioning. If you are learning your first foreign language, you may want to consider
learning, as Benny suggests, in order to become accustomed to thinking in a foreign
language. Once you decide to take the plunge, here are some things to keep in mind:

Context
Where you are mentally makes an enormous difference. Just a few hours ago, I was having a
conversation in French and the famous surrealist painter Salvador Dal came up. I began to
talk about the Dal museum in northern Spain and before I even realized it, I was halfway
though a sentence in Spanish. The act of thinking about that place even for a moment, with all
the signs and people communicating in Spanish, was enough to shift my mental context.
There are countless examples like this, and not just in foreign languages. In this video in the
Economist, a man reverts to the accent of his youth when thinking about his childhood without
even realizing it. Our brains are pattern-matching machines and one of the major cues they
draw upon is that of context. If you interrupt me while I am doing my Mandarin flashcards, no
matter what language you speak to me in my brains first reaction will be to reach for Chinese
at least until it shifts contexts.
This is exactly why polyglots associate gestures and other cultural emblems with their language
learning. The more context that is associated with the knowledge the stronger your
recollection will be. One of my hobbies is following the field of neuroscience, but instead of
boring you with all the data let me simply refer to the Wikipedia page on context-based
learning and cite two important bits.

1) Context-based memory is the reason retracing your steps is useful when you lose
something.

2) From the scientific literature it is concluded, When a person is studying, he/she should
match the context as best as possible to the testing context.

The first and foremost way we can leverage context is to create a language bubble (even if you
are learning from home where nobody speaks your language). The goal is to be surrounded by
the language as much as possible so it actually becomes inconvenient to think in your native
language. Reading news and listening to music in this way allows you to begin to develop a
contextual world to live in where everything is tied to your target language. A language is
much more than words, after all.

Conditioning
Thinking in a new language is a decision you can make. If you know even a few dozen key
grammar words, you can begin to think in your target language thanks largely to the 80/20 rule
in language learning. It is easier than speaking in the language because you will not be
embarrassed (unless you have a malicious alter-ego). It requires less confidence but
more motivation than speaking.
During the early stages, you may be using more of your native language than your target
language, and that is fine. You will also probably be translating at first rather than thinking
fluently, and that is fine, too. What is important is that you make a conscious effort to use
the target language in your thoughts, not just in your conversations.
To keep up motivation, I highly suggest a journal (digital or analogue) that you keep with you
at all times. When you do not know how to say (ahem, think) a key word just write it down. At
the end of the day look up the words, or even better, ask a native. You now have a list of
practical vocabulary to learn (instead of studying shoelaces and aardvark from a
book)! For extra credit, date each entry you will begin to notice how much smaller your daily
lists get (and how much more esoteric). Thats progress you can see!
If you are ready to put aside your shame (and have understanding roommates or family
members), it is also quite useful to talk to yourself. Aside from being quite liberating and useful
in organizing your thoughts, it also allows you to practice pronunciation. Sometimes I even
have conversations with myself, acting out different personas, which each speak a different
language, in order to practice switching between languages. I may get strange looks in the
street, but this habit has also been the start of some interesting conversations.

I can promise one thing: if you make a conscious and continuous effort to think everything you
can in your target language, you will begin to surprise yourself. One day you will hear yourself
think a mi me encanta instead of I like, and you will not even know where it came
from. The context of thinking in the language will also mean that you pick up new words that
you are exposed to without even realizing it. A couple times a week now I use a word in a
sentence that I do not remember studying, yet I am sure I have heard other people say.

Thinking Fluently
The biggest challenge with thinking in the language is the frustration that comes with not
being able to fully express yourself inside your own head. As I have said, it is fine to substitute
your native language where needed at first but the key to thinking fluently is your frame of
mind. You can choose to become frustrated, succumbing to perfection paralysis, or you can
choose to see each unknown word as one key piece in the fluency puzzle. One day you will
wake up from a dream and not even register that, it was not in your native language.

Visualization
Thinking in a foreign language is essentially a form of visualization or rehearsal that prepares
you for the real deal (an actual conversation). With visualization, we can go through the steps
of attempting, to identifying a mistake, to correcting it in a very short period. In other words,
the feedback loop is very tight. As researcher Kathryn Schulz points out in this TED video, being
wrong is quite normal and perhaps even good as long as you become aware of your mistakes
and correct them when possible.
I love discussing all the benefits of visualization. The most astonishing thing is that the brain
cannot. One study has shown that the brain sends identical impulses to the legs when
imagining running. In another study, participants who imagined playing the piano showed
nearly identical development in the motor cortex of the brain as those who actually played the
piano. In short, the brain treats visualization like the real deal.
What does all this mean for us? Well, for one, it means that thinking in a language is much
more relevant than we may have previously believed. Every thought that passes though your
brain has the potential to act as a mini-exercise in your target language, not just as passive
rehearsal but also as an active exercise. When you add up all the thoughts you have in a day,
the potential for change is quite impressive.