Bilingual dictionaries are a crutch. Speaking English to your friends is a waste of time if your goal is to speak Italian. Making grammatical comparisons between English and Italian are worthless. It sounds counterintuitive, but in the end, each language has rules and forms that are unique and sometimes illogical. And translating back and forth in your head before speaking or reading is the ultimate fool's errand that will never lead to real-time speaking competence.
So many people approach language as a science and get completely tongue-tied—witness the e-mail questions this SiteGuide receives daily about obscure Italian grammatical points and textbook recommendations. Learners obsess over minutiae, as if Italian could be dissected, instead of speaking Italian and interacting with native speakers. Imitate them. Mimic them. Ape them. Copy them. Let go of your ego and make believe you're an actor trying to sound Italian. But please—no books with something else to memorize. That turns off students immediately, and is not effective in the least.
If there’s one bit of advice I can offer to anyone studying Italian, regardless of your level: Stop thinking in English! Ignore English grammar—you’re wasting a lot of mental energy trying to translate literally and construct sentences according to English syntax.
In a letter to the editor in The New York Times Magazine, Lance Strate, an associate professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in The Bronx reinforces this point: "...it does not follow that all languages are equal, and therefore interchangeable. If this were true, translation would be a relatively simple and straight-forward affair, and learning another language would involve nothing more than learning to substitute one code for another, much like using Roman numerals.
"The truth is that different languages differ in highly significant ways, in grammar as well as vocabulary, which is why each language represtents a unique way of codifying, expressing, and understanding the world. We do not become fluent in a new language until we stop translating and simply start thinking in the new language, because each language represents a distinctive medium of thought."
