At which point in learning a language do you stop comparing it

>>10024622
>How do I stop thinking of the English term when trying to speak German and just speak it naturally?
Why don't you just do the opposite and start thinking about German terms whenever speaking English? Pretend you're German and trying to learn English.
>Also, the phrase "Es tur mir lied" literally translates to "It causes me sorrow" yet Google Translate changes it to "I am sorry". Why is that?
Google Translate is an artificial neural network program that generates results based on its node connection weights being updated in proportion to their gradient on the error function. So nobody explicitly decides to make that German phrase translate to "I am sorry." It learned to do that because that's how people have most often translated that phrase when it's encountered it in its training, and so its weights adjusted accordingly to where it fires off values that map out to that answer when it receives that German phrase as input.

Well even when you learn new words in English, you learn them in terms of existing words and concepts you have in your mind, it's just that you have so many and the process is so gradual that you don't really notice you're doing it. You are always making all kinds of subconscious associations, many of which you would not consider rational if you really thought about them, for example how the Germans have an intuitive "feel" for what the prefixes "zer-" or "ver-" mean. There is only a family resemblance between those terms - it's hard to define exactly what they mean and one can always find exceptions. But someone with a feel for the language will be able to use them properly without thinking.

With learning another language it's similar, it's just much harder, because you're getting a lot more at once, you have a lot less context to work with, and there are a lot of idiomatic expressions that will simply never feel comfortable to you. With things like "Es tut mir leid," textbooks will often encourage to simply remember what it idiomatically translates to, "I'm sorry." But I would encourage you to do both, and try to think of the grammatical logic behind idioms when using them. It can actually make them easier than simply remembering by rote. Eventually it will become so well-worn for you that you stop noticing.

Also eventually you will build up lots of those associations without even realising you're doing it. Whenever I learn a language, I notice that it's about 50/50. For every word or phrase I strain to remember, I'll notice that some other word auto-inserted itself into my memory without any conscious effort. As your vocabulary reaches a good number of those basic words, and especially as you first begin reading things that you are actually interested in and that have a common vocabulary with which you can quickly become contextually familiar, strange new words and expressions will start to stand out instead of being the norm, and this makes them a lot easier to remember. It only seems painful at the beginning because absolutely everything is new and strange and you're getting it all at once.

How often in your life have you ever thought about what you're "really saying" in using various expressions? "Excuse me" is more like a command than a request, if taken literally, but it feels like a request because that's how it's used. An English learner once told me that "don't take this the wrong way, but..." was a very confusing phrase for them, because they were trying to picture the "logic" of it (like, what is the "wrong way"? Upside down?), and I told them, it doesn't necessarily have any set logic to it. You just know what it means by feeling. You will get that eventually in a foreign language, don't worry - your brain is surprisingly good at learning it. But you have to stick with it, and let the layers slowly build up.

>>10024728
>there are a lot of idiomatic expressions that will simply never feel comfortable to you.

I meant to say, totally comfortable. Certain things will always feel a bit weird. I was talking to an Italian guy yesterday who is very fluent in English, but who always makes the same small mistake in elementary grammar because that's how it works in Italian. It's so counterintuitive to him to do it how English does it, it would be like trying to force yourself to say "The dog run" instead of "The dog runs," just feels off.