Translating words in head before speaking, help 🙏

Hi guys, for some background information, i grew up in Singapore, where english and chinese were both taught in schools. English is my main language, but as it is very common to speak in broken English (singlish), my grammer and sentence structure may be kinda fxcked so do forgive me haha.

Anyway, I found out recently that whenever i spoke chinese, i will always tranlsate the english words in my mind before speaking it in chinese. For example: I'll think in english: Mum, what's for dinner?, and then translate english to chinese in my head, 妈妈,晚餐吃什么? (mā mā, wan cān chī shén me?), and then I'll say the translated part out to my mum.

I find this to be very mentally exhausting and would like to know how i can understand chinese (and maybe other languages). Because i can understand english just fine, i just do. But when someone speaks to me in Chinese, i have to translate what they said to me into english and reply them after translating what i want to say to them from English to Chinese.

Figured I'd ask this sub because I'm pretty confident I'm doing something wrong, i just don't know how to fix it lol.

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