I initially didn’t like using translations for things I don’t know when reaching upper-intermediate levels in my target languages; however, I experienced a significant boost in my Spanish today when using Google Translate! 🚀

If you’ve reached a level with your target language where you can speak monolingually, Google Translate can be used to look up a few words (key: only “a few”) you don’t know in your target language during a conversation. It’s a quick way to keep yourself speaking longer and avoid verbal hang-ups. 👍

While I still think it’s quite valuable to describe a word you’re trying to say to another person in your target language (like a game of Taboo, but the person who is describing the word doesn’t know it! 😂), I think there needs to be a bit of balance between, e.g., using Spanish you do know to learn the Spanish you don’t know and using machine translation.

And let’s face it, besides highly contextual mediums like video, pictures, body language, etc., an adult, absolute beginner of their target language will most likely rely heavily on translations in the beginning.

However, it’s good to “take off the training wheels” at some point and invest the time in monolingual input and output of your target language, e.g., watching Spanish videos with Spanish subtitles once you’re ready.

Then, once you can understand, speak, and write about 80% of your target language without any assistance from a tutor, a Google Search, etc., you can add some tool-assistance via Google Translate for about 20% or less of the words, expressions, and sentences in your target language that you don’t know.