Akuperma: “Aramaic and Hebrew are closely related, similar to French and Spanish, or German and Yiddish. Hebrew is as different from English, as English is from Chinese or Navaho or Zulu.
If you are serious about learning Torah, learn Hebrew.”
Your logic is flawed. If your problem with learning from an artscroll is because it’s in English and therefore it takes away from the context of the original text (that’s how I’m understanding you) than how is any english speaker who only learns gemara till they’re a little older (5th grade) supposed to learn? How are you supposed to learn when you come across a new word? obviously your brain makes a translation into your native tongue. As for words that people have a hard time to translate because it becomes part of your gemara lingo (i.e. lechaora) artscroll has academic words for all of those. Besides you get both the aramaic and english with artscroll, it’s not like Soncino which is straight english.
That said: I still believe that one should learn in yeshiva from a standard gemara for reasons already mentioned here (i.e. with hard work comes greater analysis and understanding, and long-term memory, etc.) but if one comes across a word they aren’t familiar with it’s a great tool (Jastrow is quicker for words in my opinion, and mesivta is better for a sugya you’re truly having problems with).
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