Mother tongue mirroring is the adaptation of word-for word translation in

language education Language education – the process and practice of teaching a second or foreign language – is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, but can be an interdisciplinary field. There are four main learning categories for language education: ...

. The aim is to make foreign constructions salient and transparent to learners and, in many cases, spare them the technical jargon of grammatical analysis. It differs from

literal translation Literal translation, direct translation or word-for-word translation, is a translation of a text done by translating each word separately, without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. In Translation studies, trans ...

and

interlinear text In linguistics and pedagogy, an interlinear gloss is a gloss (series of brief explanations, such as definitions or pronunciations) placed between lines, such as between a line of original text and its translation into another language. When gloss ...

as used in the past, since it takes the progress learners have made into account and only focuses upon one specific structure at a time. As a didactic device, it can only be used to the extent that it remains intelligible to the learner, unless it is combined with a normal idiomatic translation.

Examples

Compound words

Compounds can be broken down into their component parts to help learners understand their logic. For example, in German: So 'loanword' is originally an exact copy of the German compound, or

calque In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language wh ...

. The term 'mother tongue mirroring' can itself be regarded as a calque from German, because it is originally a translation of ''.

Idioms and proverbs

Over and above knowing what idioms actually mean in order to use them properly, learners want to know how they come to mean what they mean. In another example from German:

Pragmatic formulas

In French: In Turkish: In Armenian:

Collocations

In German:

Syntax

Mother tongue mirroring is most helpful for discovering the hidden anatomy of foreign grammars, especially of non-related languages. In Mandarin: Untranslatable particles such as Mandarin ''le'' (了), meaning 'temporary change of state or situation', are simply inserted in the mirrored version: For more Chinese constructions mirrored in English see Wu.

Generative principle

Making a structure transparent is not an aim in itself but serves the ultimate aim of enabling the learner, in Wilhelm von Humboldt's words, to make infinite use of finite means (“von endlichen Mitteln unendlichen Gebrauch machen”). In foreign language teaching, this basic human capacity is captured by the

generative principle In foreign language teaching, the generative principle reflects the human capacity to generate an infinite number of phrases and sentences from a finite grammatical or linguistic competence. This capacity was captured in Wilhelm von Humboldt's fam ...

. In “The awful German language”

Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has p ...

humorously explained the difficulties of German syntax and morphology by mirroring long sentences in English. Although the main intent is satirical rather than didactic, Twain provides interesting insights into the workings of the German language. Mirroring is amply used in commercial phrasebooks and computer courses and is a common device in scientific grammars of remote languages, but has been ignored by modern coursebook authors, along with other bilingual techniques such as the sandwich technique, presumably because of the mother tongue taboo, still prevailing in mainstream language teaching methodology. According to Butzkamm & Caldwell, mother tongue mirroring should be re-instated as a central teaching technique, especially when learners are not ready for grammatical analysis. It is analysis by analogy. It is foreign grammar in native words.