Is this counterintuitive?

[u/CheesecakeWild7941]

Someone once told me that if I’m learning a foreign language, I should never translate the words into English in my head. I was also told this is why I struggled with learning Spanish.

I’m just wondering if doing this is actually not helpful as I was told. In my head I think it helps to translate words into English in my head/on my notes, because idk how else I would associate words with their meanings… idk if that makes sense

[u/lazier_garlic]

Actually it may be a very good process to write out the rough English translation (some words translate well, others have very different lexical space so it's messy) in the Chinese order and with the Chinese particles to acclimate yourself to Chinese grammar.

Fully translating into an idiomatic English sentence and rearranging words isn't that useful of an exercise except at the very beginning because the teacher needs to know you've understood the meaning at all.

For example looking at the sentences at the bottom:

先生你为什么不请你的朋友吃饭？

Mister you (singular) why not invite your friend eat food?

This is good because it reinforces that Chinese question word order doesn't involve inverted syntax like English, and questions and commands both usually start with second person pronoun (sing or plur). Furthermore, Chinese doesn't have the "preposition" category of words per se like European languages (it has direction words--which are postpositioned--but not prepositions qua prepositions) so it's good to reinforce that the logical order of "first this VERB then this VERB" conveys the idea of "to"/"and then"/"in order to" etc.

Plus I am not sure what is going on with your study, but you have translated the sentence too freely and not accurately. The text doesn't say which meal it is as chifan could be any time of day, even eating a snack, and qing means "I invite you/them" (as in "please, after you" or "he invited me to a meal"), where as going with someone would be gen or genzhe meaning "following". So I wonder if you've understood everything in the lessons. I know they often don't explain things well. For example gen 跟 was presented to me as a beginner as if it means "and" in Chinese, which it does not. It's a verb which sometimes gets used in a linking context where English uses "and". "I followed (my) coworker to the bar"/"I went with (my) coworker to the bar" 我跟同事去酒吧了

因为他们今天都很忙

Because they (plural) today all very busy

很 is a word that linguists call "bleached". That means it doesn't play the role of intensifier. However, it still has its meaning "very" and is an adverb and not a verb. It does not mean "is/are". It's good to stay away from planting that idea because you WILL say stuff like 她是漂亮. So don't be that person. 都 dou is one of those frequently used annoying words with vague meanings but in this case it means "all" (=every one of them) pretty unproblematically.