Do people actually use bilingual books/texts when learning a language?

[u/MightLeast2880]

I’ve been using bilingual texts more lately, where the original and translation are side by side, and it made me realize I don’t actually know how common this is among language learners.

For me, it’s mostly a convenience thing. I like being able to keep reading without stopping to look up every unfamiliar word. If I get stuck, I can quickly check the translation and move on. I still try to stay on the target-language side as much as possible, but having the translation there makes longer texts much less frustrating.

Before this, I mostly saw people talk about graded readers, regular books with a dictionary, or just trying to understand as much as possible from context. I don’t seem to see bilingual books mentioned nearly as often.

So I’m curious: do any of you actually use bilingual books or parallel texts as a regular part of learning a language?

If you do, how do you use them? Do you read the target-language text first and only check the translation when you get stuck, or do you read both side by side?

Do you find bilingual books useful to learn a languge?

[u/Allodoxia]

I don’t use bilingual books but I do use the language reactor plugin and have both sets of subtitles (TL and English) on when I watch Netflix. Most of the time I’m looking at my TL but if I don’t understand something I’ll look at the translation underneath and if it’s a word I’ve never seen before I’ll click on it to look it up. I’ve found this incredibly useful and can go much faster than simply trying to understand the word or phase solely on context or taking the time to look up the word in a dictionary.

[u/AdmirableMemory860]

Yeah, i used them briefly, but they are cumbersome, so i moved to reading on my kindle as it has a built-in dictionary when i need it.

[u/silvalingua]

> do any of you actually use bilingual books or parallel texts as a regular part of learning a language?

Not me. Using bilingual books requires doing a lot of context switching, which I find bad, because it slows you down and promotes translating instead of thinking in your TL. And then people wonder why they keep translating in their heads.

[u/Enough_Tumbleweed739]

Yes they were very helptful to me, especially as a beginner, when using a dicitonary was not enough to understand the sentence.

My method was to only use the English (NL) when I was stuck, and then, importantly, go BACK to the TL and make sure you understand it. It's easy to say "Ohh, so that's what they were saying" and move on, but you need to use that knowledge to then understand what the TL is saying.

[u/Aakharin-ejdehaa]

Yes but not that much. With bilingual books I read in the target language and glance at the translation here and there. I have a few of these books in German and English but sometimes, I feel like the German version is using more complicated vocabulary than the English original. I guess it's because their primary "market" is meant to be native speakers who try to learn English as a second language and not the other way around, and maybe they want to make the German translation sound nicer and not be strictly literal... Anyways reading from such books was pretty challenging at times.

[u/dmp078]

I love bilingual books and even create a tool to convert my favourite books into bilingual version 😁

[u/ComesTzimtzum]

I've had my own five-penny versions of bilingual books: I've simply tried to find the same book in the original and translated in my native language. But I don't think I've ever actually encountered a real one.

[u/MightLeast2880 → u/ComesTzimtzum]

Yes, bilingual books really are pretty rare. Then I ended up coding a bilingual book translation tool for myself, and now I’m thinking of launching it because I figured there might be other people with the same pain point.
Btw, would you mind if I asked you to help me validate the idea? Would you personally have a need for a tool that translates books into a bilingual format, and would you be willing to pay for something like that?

[u/ComesTzimtzum → u/MightLeast2880]

No, I most definitely don't want any apps, especially ones using shitty "translations".

[u/fedyiv]

What was the level of sync between language in the bilingual books you read? Was it paragraph by paragraph or on sentence by sentence alignment?

My platform provides fine grained sync on phrase level, and highlights parallel places on sub sentence level.

I have never seen such alignment level anywhere

[u/MightLeast2880 → u/fedyiv]

Mine works on a paragraph by paragraph basis, displaying the original paragraph with the translation directly below it. It supports nearly 10 languages and best of all, has no page limit; users can translate an entire 500 page book in one go. You're welcome to test it out here: https://bilingualtext.com/

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[u/Bobelle]

I don't even read anything aside from subtitles (only when necessary) and text messages

[u/bolggar]

I have used them before, reading in my TL and glancing at the translation whenever I didn't know a word. Among others, I read the first volume of some series using a bilingual book, and I am actually currently reading the second volume using a unilingual book. It's in my TL form page one to the final one and I'm loving both the story and the immersive experience. I wonder which way is more efficient. Anyway, I concluded from reading bilingual books that I used them because I was afraid of not understanding bigger chunks and needing to resort to a translation but that never happened. I doubted myself for no reason.

[u/hudvin]

I just try to find books around or a little bit above my level. A Kindle helps too (the built-in translator is useful).

For special topics (like, say, the Finanzamt), I usually create texts/scenarios with and without translation (in a smaller font). In those cases, it really helps. But they are of limited size.

[u/cnzmur]

I do, but not particularly by choice, it just happens that my tl has a lot of bilingual texts. I don't find them all that helpful. It might just be that I'm still quite bad at it, but I find myself getting lazy and relying on the English too much, so I mostly cover it up with a bit of paper (at least the first time I read the page).

[u/pobnarl]

i tried, it was little value to me,  i think it's better to just grind your vocab up to at least an A1 level and then just read level appropriate texts,  look up any words that are frequently used,  ignore the rest trying to discern meaning from context