I love that quote from Dr. Lomb. It's fun to attack language from multiple angles: literature, news, Twitter, spoken conversation, music, movies, TV, academic prose, dictionaries, grammars.

There's an interesting difference between learning language as a child and learning as an adult. As a child learning your first language, you're not "translating" from anything. You are learning to express ideas, emotions, etc. using words for the first time. Whereas what can be tricky as an adult language learner is, while it is natural to try translating ideas from your native language into your target language, depending on the similarity of the languages, this eventually becomes harmful, because you end up trying to force one language into another. At a certain point along the road, you have to bid adieu to your native language and really enter the target, to learn how things are actually expressed, not just substituting word for word.

I remember a salient example of this: one time I asked a friend from Shanghai, who was showing me some Mandarin, how I would respond if someone asked me if I like ice cream. I asked if I would simply reply, "Yes," or "I do," like in English. She told me that, no, you would say "I like." I found this fascinating. Later, further on into my Portuguese studies, I learned that this situation is quite similar in Brazil. Usually, one would answer the question as in Mandarin, "I like."