I think it happens on its own eventually!
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There is a blog post on this by Aran:
Hereās how the process goes, if you just relax and let it take its course:
At first: you hear with a vague sense of familiarity, but you donāt understand.
Then: you start to pick out individual words, and you link them correctly to words in your first language (which feels as though youāre ātranslatingā).
Then: you understand longer collections of words, and start to feel that youāre āgetting the gistā, but youāre still hearing a kind of echo in your first language, so you still think youāre translating.
Eventually: the echoes in your own language become more and more quiet, until at some point you realise that youāve understood something without any conscious connection to your first language.
The more you try to fight this process, the more you try to force yourself ānot to translateā, the less fun youāll have (and, probably, the more slowly youāll progress).
(off-topic: is it possible to quote something from outside the forum?
Edit: Thanks!)
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You can link to it
How? Is it different to what Iāve done?
I think its exactly what you have done
You can put anything into a quote box by highlighting it and then clicking the " button at the top of the posting box. [Or just by putting a > sign].
Like this.
But in other news, what she said. Er, I mean what I said, up thereā¦
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And many congratulations for that! And a warm welcome to the forumā¦ 
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Diolch
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Croeso @angelahaycocks for raising a very important problem. Diolch @Novem for the quote which I hadnāt seen! And diolch @aran for writing the quote in the first place!! Erā¦where is this blog?
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i do this all the timeā¦although frequently without success!!!
I agree with leiafee: if you use a language enough it comes naturally. I have to speak Spanish all the time and have now got to the stage where I donāt think in English any more.
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When we start to learn something we try to understand all the separate processes at the same time time.
We think about depressing the clutch while changing gear while being aware of the speed and that vehicle over there and those cyclists there. To start off with itās all a bit overwhelming. We need to be aware, to understand.
This is like translating, at the start of language learning. To continue the analogy, with driving, after a while the different parts of driving come together, become automatic.
For those of us that learned our times tables we know that 6 times 7 is 42. We donāt need to calculate it, to translate it.
Itās called chunking. Adding little bits of jigsaw together until they become something recognisable and we have almost forgotten the different elements that go to making the new picture.
So I suppose we find less need for the translator when we understand, in our bones, more phrases, constructions, and vocabulary.
How to switch off? Speak more. Listen more. Get the language from the short term, or working memory into the long term memory.
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Using a language automatically doesnāt come from trying to use it on itās own. It comes from having to use it on its own. This is why you acclimate in an immersive environment: Things happen too fast to translate and so you use the bits of the language you catch and the context of the situation to figure out whatās going on - just as you do in your native language.
In this regard, the review lessons that are speeded up are excellent. Itās like listening to a conversation with a lousy phone connection - you canāt get everything so your brain has to fill things in on the fly. If you want to ditch the translating, you need to do things like this that go too fast for you to translate. Listen to audiobooks at an advanced speed, making no effort to understand. Youāll soon find you know whatās going on. Again, the key to not translating is to do things that go fast enough that you canāt translate so your brain has to do the best it can with the Welsh it has.
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You just did.
All about quoting on this forum here.
Oh, ane by the way ā¦@angelahaycocks is a member of this forum already from January 2013 so Iād rather say Croeso nol!
And about switching off the translator in your head Angela - previous posters said everything already so Iāll give no further advise here. I actually have none apart from what has already being said.
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I have a little problem. I learned to drive OK at 50. I wanted to be mobile reasonably soon after moving full time to small village with infrequent buses, so I learned in an automatic. Not having gears to fret about was great! Later, I found automatics can go wrong in ways normal cars cannot, so I learned with gears, I guess like learning a wider vocabulary. But I do not have the kind of visual brain which can do jigsaws, I never graduated past the ones for infants, with about six huge pieces! I believe some people are naturally better at languages than others, so if a person has problems, just maybe they are, well not like me with jigsaws - we all learn at least one language unless seriously damaged, but just not as good at languages as some others. Yes/No?
The ātranslatorā really does turn itself off with time. I go to the Saith Seren in Wrecsam most Mondays and these days I hardly ever switch my mind to English at all. If I get stuck, I tend to find a way around what I want to say in Welsh, only rarely stopping in my tracks to think of a Saesneg word. And all this after a year and a half of weekly visits from over the border in Lancashire. I would imagine that speaking Welsh in the wild daily would have similar results in a fraction of the time.
Back in England, on Tuesday I was in Tesco and the sound system was playing canned music with fairly poor acoustic quality so the lyrics of the songs were by no means obvious. Then I noticed I was hearing snippets of Welsh that were not there. After the Saith Seren and listening to Radio Cymru in the car, my brain had gone into āCymraeg Firstā decoding mode when listening to a random mess of sounds. So now it appears I can hear Welsh lyrics more easily than English ones because I listen to Welsh music a lot more often.
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Diolch am pob helpu!
All really good advice, thank you. It makes sense now
A couple of things seem relevant here, in terms of what Iāve seen. Itās known that early exposure is key with language development - some studies have suggested that children from homes where they regularly interact verbally with adults can have heard over a million more words (not different words, but counting all times theyāve heard a word spoken) by the time they start school than children from homes where they do not regularly interact verbally with adults. This difference then matches to a lot of standard measures of achievement, as well as to levels of confidence and breadth of usage in the mother tongue.
Weāve also seen some evidence that working memory is key to using the SSi Method - and while Iām aware of studies that show improvement in working memory on specific tasks, Iām not aware of any that show improvements on different working memory tasks - so itās not clear how trainable working memory is.
So I would expect that someone from a verbally impoverished home who also has a below average working memory would find learning and using a new language more difficult than someone with wide early exposure to their first language who also has a strong working memory.
Those two markers aside, though, Iām not aware of any other non-psychological distinguishing factors - and I believe psychological factors (like willingness to make mistakes, willingness to keep trying, etc) are significantly more important than working memory and early exposureā¦
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