When I started learning English...

Hi everybody, thanks for the help in your corrections!

When I first started learning English, I didn’t even know what a phrasal verb was. However, I thought it was a good idea to start translating things. I used to translate everything I read. Literally. No matter if it didn’t make any sense in Spanish. I remember having wondered “do they really want to say this? But it makes no sense!”.

The only times it wasn’t as disastrous was when I kind of used my common sense, as with the phrasal verb “to take out”, in which I first translated into Spanish as “sacar afuera” but as “sacar” after much thought. I said “this doesn’t sound elegant at all, let’s omit afuera, I don’t think translating a word sometimes is that bad”.

(Always translate words from diffrent languages to another. They could mean horrible things in a diffrent language and most people may not undertsnad what you are saying).

A little time after, I understood one doesn’t always translate word by word, but rather the general meaning of something, and then I realized the problem wasn’t my knowledge about English, but that of Spanish. My native language. I was kind of obsessed with it, because I thought understanding the language as a native speaker would allow me to understand others more easily, so I started buying Spanish grammar books. I remember that my family asked me every time “if you already speak Spanish, what are those books for?”. Sometimes, I wasn’t able to explain to them what I had in mind, but others, I just told them: "I’ll be able to understand other languages better”, and they just looked at me as if I were joking.

When I started learning English...

Hi everybody, thanks in advance for your corrections!

When I first started learning English, I didn’t even know what a phrasal verb was. However, I thought it was a good idea to start translating things words. I used to translate all I read literally, no matter if it didn’t make any sense in Spanish. I remember having wondered “do they really want to say this? But it makes no sense!”.

The only time (times?) it wasn’t as disastrous was (were?) when I kind of used my common sense,. as With the phrasal verb “to take out”, which I first translated into Spanish as “sacar afuera” but as “sacar” after much thought. I said “this doesn’t sound elegant at all, let’s omit afuera, I don’t think not translating a word sometimes is that bad”.

A little time after, I understood one doesn’t always translate word by word, but rather the general meaning of something, and then I realized the problem wasn’t my knowledge about of English, but that of Spanish, my native language. I was kind of obsessed with it, because I thought understanding the language one is a native speaker of, would allow me to understand others more easily,. so I started buying Spanish grammar books. I remember that my family asked me every time “if you already speak Spanish, what are those books for?”. Sometimes, I wasn’t able to explain them what I had in mind., but others, I just told them “I’ll be able to understand other languages better”, and they just looked at me as if I were joking.