u/Glittering-Usual-450

I used to do this all the time with Chinese:

1. look up a sentence
2. understand it
3. feel like I "learned" it
4. completely lose it the next day

What helped me was treating translation as the start of the rep, not the end of it.

If I translate something, I try to do 3 tiny things right away:

• say the original sentence out loud once or twice
• keep the useful frame, not just the English meaning
• change one small part of it

So instead of only saving one translation, I keep reusable patterns like:

• what does this ... mean?
• how do you read this ...?
• is this sentence natural?

That little variation step mattered way more than I expected. It turns the sentence from "something I understood once" into "something I might actually say again."

If I translate a sentence and don't do anything with it, I basically assume it's gone by tomorrow.

Curious what other people's post-translation routine looks like, if you have one.