In my experience, adult learners strongly dislike learning without translation. If you show an adult a picture of something and say this is a “flug”, only in t

In my experience, adult learners strongly dislike learning without translation. If you show an adult a picture of something and say this is a “flug”, only in the very simplest cases (where they are most likely just imagining their native word for the object) will they be satisfied. If it’s a class of objects or a more abstract idea they tend to feel very unsure until they have accessed some kind of translation, even if it is a bad or misleading one. In some ways the native word is more important than the actual meaning for these learners. No native word == no feeling of understanding. A student who enjoys avoiding using translation tends to progress very well, but it’s difficult to tell if they are simply good at the target language already and don’t need translation, or their avoidance of translation is the key to their success. Teasing out the direction of causality isn’t easy. I’d love to see a language textbook produced with not language. Just pictures of situations, common items and other prompts. The idea would be to take use this textbook a long with a native speaker to listen to and learn examples of all different useful parts of the language. Even then, I feel the imagine choice would probably bias certain language features more than others.