Dictionary dependence

One of the Livejournal language communities brought to mind recently how much people have the tendency, when composing in a language not their own, to just look up a word in the dictionary, assume they have the right meaning, and not go any further.

In French class (and this was a fairly advanced class), "Les gens que je pends dehors." The people I hang (as in 'by the neck, until dead') outside. The person in question wasn't talking about mass executions, but "the people I hang out with." How can you go to French class for four years without a whack on the head with the "don't translate idioms literally" clue-by-four?

It's not even idioms, all the time. Mixing up the word for the introduction of a book with the word for the introduction of two people to each other; writing "altavoz de español" (Spanish loudpseaker) to mean a person who speaks Spanish; writing "is it hard [as in "diamonds are hard"] to read inside Spanish?"

I'm sympathetic, you know. I don't have native-speaker intuitions in any of the non-English languages I speak, and any time I write an essay I certainly make a couple howlers, except maybe in French. But how hard is it to realize that there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between words in English and words in other languages? I probably have more of an advantage than I sometimes realize, having learned to speak two languages by the time I was eight, because I was able to internalize that. You just can't expect the words to be the same. Example sentences and clarifications in dictionaries help. Google helps surprisingly much. Etymology and learning other languages helps a little, depending on the language--you get a lot of mileage out of this in Romance languages, anyway. Back-translation also helps--you find the word you want in the English-X side, and then you look it up again in the X-English side to see a (usually more extensive) English definition.

But the most important thing is to internalize the expectation that things may be different.

Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionaries are sold separately, and I recently realized that I haven't used my E-J dictionary very much at all. Granted, I certainly have in the past, when I had to write essays for school. But the thing I realized, sooner or later, was that I was a lot more likely to write good sentences if I stuck to the words that I already had seen in print and knew how to use. (On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for writing sentences you think are fun, whether or not they're any good. My high school Japanese teacher thought I was so interesting, or possibly deranged).