If you’ve been told you should never translate when learning English, forget it…instead use your Spanish efficiently and smartly.
You’ve been told a million times by English teachers: ‘never translate’. Well, that’s really poor advice. It comes from a good idea: it is indeed a lot easier to think in the language you’re communicating in. However, there are two big problems with this. Number one is pretty simple – you don’t (I imagine) have a magic switch in your head that allows you to choose which language to think in. Secondly, there are a lot of benefits from using your (hopefully) large Spanish knowledge for the translation when learning a second or third language.
