I believe using your own language is fine (please see my other comment).
That said, you can still use pictures together with example sentences. You don't have to find a picture that unambigously means "hope". It can be a picture of the Red Sox or your $favorite_underdog for instance, the dvd cover of a movie related to hope, etc. The point is to improve recall, not "skip the translation step".
That said, you can still use pictures together with example sentences. You don't have to find a picture that unambigously means "hope". It can be a picture of the Red Sox or your $favorite_underdog for instance, the dvd cover of a movie related to hope, etc. The point is to improve recall, not "skip the translation step".