Study in your own language from an English textbook

If English is not your first language, an English textbook asks you to do two hard things at once: understand the ideas and decode the language they are written in. When a practice question goes wrong, it is hard to tell which one tripped you up. One way through is to study in your own language first, so you can check the ideas, and then practise the same material in English, so the exam's words feel familiar. This guide gives a simple two-pass method, explains where it helps and where it does not, and shows it with a practice quiz.

Why it helps to study in your own language first

Reading a hard page in a second language takes effort. Some of that effort goes into the language itself: unfamiliar words, long sentences and idioms. When you then test yourself in English and get a question wrong, you cannot be sure whether you misunderstood the science or simply misread the question.

Testing yourself in your first language separates the two. If you answer well in your own language, you know the ideas and can focus on the English terms. If you still struggle, the problem is the content, and rereading the page in English more slowly will not fix it.

This is practical advice rather than a research finding; we did not find a study we could check that tests this exact method. What the research does support strongly is the core of it: testing yourself. A large review by Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated practice testing as one of the most useful ways to study, and rereading as one of the least. In Roediger and Karpicke (2006), students who tested themselves on a passage remembered more of it days later than students who read it again.

Why you still need English for the exam

If your exam is in English, it will use English terms. Knowing the idea of photosynthesis in Spanish does not help if you do not recognise "chloroplast" on the paper. So the goal is not to replace English, it is to use your own language as a first step.

A good rule: understand it in your language, then practise answering in the language of the exam. Do not stop after the first pass.

The two-pass method

1. Pass one, in your language. Make a practice quiz from the English page, with the questions in your first language. Answer it. Read every explanation. This checks whether you understood the ideas.
2. Fix the ideas you missed. For each missed question, go back to the English page and find the part it came from. Now you know what to look for, the English is easier to follow.
3. Pass two, in English. Make a second quiz from the same page, this time in English. Answer it. Questions you got right in pass one but miss here usually point to English terms you do not yet know.
4. Keep a two-column word list. Write each key term in English on one side and in your language on the other. Test yourself on the English side before the exam.
5. Retake the English quiz later. A few days later, retake the English quiz only. That is the one that looks like your exam.

Worked example: a Filipino student with an English biology book

Say Ana's first language is Filipino, her biology book is in English, and her test is in English. Here is the two-pass method with Study Shot, which writes multiple-choice questions from a photo of a page.

1. Photograph the page. Ana takes a photo of the page on how plant cells make food. She chooses 10 questions at the Tiered level, which climbs from basic questions on key terms to advanced ones that ask her to apply the idea.
2. Choose Filipino as the quiz language. Study Shot offers 50 quiz languages, including Filipino, Spanish, Hindi and Dutch. The questions, the four answer options and the explanations come in Filipino. The app's own buttons and screens stay in English, so she still presses Create questions and Check answer. It shows a message that it is writing the questions in Filipino, which can take up to a minute.
3. Answer and read the explanations. Ana gets 8 of 10. The two misses are both about where in the cell food is made, so she rereads that part of the English page.
4. Make the English quiz. She photographs the same page again and creates a second quiz, with English as the quiz language. She gets 7 of 10. One question she knew in Filipino trips her up in English because she did not recognise the word "chloroplast". It goes on her word list.
5. Retake in English. Two days later she retakes the English quiz from her library, without looking at the page first.

Two notes. The questions and translations are written by an AI model and can contain mistakes, especially with technical terms, so check anything odd against your page and use Report a problem under the question. And each new quiz counts toward your allowance: you can make up to 10 new quizzes in 10 minutes, with a monthly allowance on top, so making two quizzes per page uses two.

When this method helps most, and when it does not

• Helps most: dense subjects with lots of new ideas, such as biology, history or economics, where the language and the content are both hard.
• Helps most: early in a topic, when you are still working out what the page says.
• Helps less: close to the exam. In the last few days, practise mainly in the exam's language.
• Helps less: subjects where most of the work is numbers or symbols, such as many maths problems, since the language is a smaller part of the challenge.

Common mistakes

• Only studying in your first language. You understand the ideas, then meet unfamiliar English words in the exam.
• Translating the whole page word by word. It is slow, and it is reading, not testing. Test yourself instead.
• Skipping the word list. The English terms are often the gap. Write them down as you find them.
• Trusting every translation. Technical words can be translated in more than one way. When in doubt, the English page is the version your exam will follow.

For more on why testing beats rereading, see the retrieval practice guide. If you are making quizzes from class notes or whiteboard photos as well as the textbook, the guide on turning notes into a quiz covers how to photograph them.

Frequently asked questions

Can I get questions in my language from a page written in English?

Yes. In Study Shot you choose the quiz language, and the questions, answers and explanations come in that language. It offers 50 quiz languages.

Will the whole app be in my language?

No. Only the quiz content is in the language you choose. The app's buttons and screens stay in English.

Should I study only in my own language?

Not if your exam is in English. Use your language to check that you understand the ideas, then practise in English so the exam's terms are familiar.

Get started

Try Study Shot: it is free to start. Photograph one page from your English textbook, take a quiz in your own language, then take one in English and compare the two scores.