Evidence that this works better than other methods being...
Seriously, with such a huge number of people trying to learn a second language (like 90% of all humans) we should have some proper studies by now.
That's essentially how I learned English. You need to add an important caveat: it takes about 10-20 years.
(ETA: on second thought, I'm maybe overstating it - what I wanted to point out is that it may take a long time to learn a new language without immersion - but that it's doable at all is good news.)
You need to add an important caveat: it takes about 10-20 years.
Learning languages is expensive; I'm not sure it's a good idea at all for ordinary English speakers, and I see a distinct lack of calculation in this post or other comments.
If you plan to never, ever live in a non-English-speaking place, yeah, learning languages other than English is not terribly useful.
Living in the same country you were born in is the lot of something like 90% of humanity and usually has been, and English-speaking may well embrace more territory than you might guess.
For example, when I visited Belgium and the Netherlands in 2005, I was shocked at how many natives spoke English and how well.
And just today, while finishing a Wikipedia experiment, I was surprised to note that the smaller German Wikipedia was sending something like half as many visits to my (English) DNB FAQ as the larger English Wikipedia. (Although I just checked, and contrary to what I thought, the German entry wasn't specifying that my page is in English, which is likely inflating click-throughs; I've added an 'Englisch' warning, so we'll see how things change after 100 days or so. Good to know this for context in my experiment, too.)
For a website by somebody with a successful track record of language learning, have a look at http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/ . As well as a lot of motivation talk (which overlaps LessWrong's akrasia discussion), it focuses on two very important concepts:
Learning in real context Rather than isolated words, you should look at whole sentences or paragraphs. These should be from real texts or spoken language aimed at native speakers (start with children's books if you want lower difficulty). Definitions are useful, and Rational_Brony's advice to look them up in the original language is good, but a definition only tells you what a words means, not the subtleties of when to use it. The best way to learn that is exposure to huge quantities of real context.
Spaced repetition software This dramatically increases your memorization eficacy, and it works very well for language learning. gwern wrote an excellent article about it which you should read if you're not already familiar with it: http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition
Very nice. I disagree with those who said it should have gone in discussion. Too much bolding, way, way too much bolding. Consider including links to, or discussion of Fluent In 3 Months or All Japanese All The Time
Speaking as someone with okay German and poor French who's currently learning Mandarin, gwern is correct, the returns for learning a language other than English that you don't need to use now are pretty low. It's really, really hard to get good at any language, and almost all multi-national workplace, English will be either the working language...
I'm gradually learning German through song lyrics. I just open a page with lyrics and Google Translate, put on the song and try to make sense of it, memorizing words and expressions. When a real English translation is available, I check that afterwards to see how I've done.
@Reasons for not learning a language:
The more languages you learn, the more access you have to humanity's written riches. That includes newspapers, research papers, literature, scientific and otherwise. Relying on translators to bring that material to your language is a dicey proposal, especially if you're looking for something very specialized. It's also a lot more comfortable to read stuff in good Native Language than in horribly butchered English, which is all too often the case with science papers (not that scientists as a whole tend to show much writi...
I'm surprised that nobody seems to have brought up any mental benefits of speaking more than one language. I'm not sure how strong the evidence is, but there has definitely been research that claims to point in that direction.
I used this technique to learn to read German in about 300 hours (1 hour / day for a year).
However I could not find a way to use it to learn Chinese or Japanese, where reading is very hard and dictionary lookup is very slow due to the non-phonetic characters. I would love to find a way around this.
Ach! I'm getting downvoted... is it because I emphasize everything? It can't be because of lack of structure, and it's definitely informative, and the paragraphs are even... The sentences are too long?
The frequent bolding did make it hard to read. Also, changes in fonts like this are frequently a sign of crankiness so they likely bring up negative associations. People may also be downvoting for the post being in Main rather than Discussion. It is on the borderline of which of those one might reasonably put it- I suspect that the lack of sources/citations may push it more into the Discussion section.
The following protocol is very dumb, and relies on a lot of mental brute force, but I find that it works very well indeed.
First, learn the alphabet. the most basic survival phrases, the phonetics, the basic grammar. This may be the steepest part of the learning curve. I recommend that you get at least an introductory book to help you through this phase, the A1 level.
Now comes the fun part.
The key element to accelerated and efficient language learning is wanting, needing, craving to understand and to be understood. Choose a text, any text, which you know will trigger all your "I want to know what it says!" instincts. I myself find that highly dramatic works, with lots of suspense and high emotional torque, are ideal. Take a dictionary and just look up every single word that you don't know. You write each one of them down, with, first, the exact pronunciation, then, their definition in the original language, the translation to your own language, and, optionally (and I do recommend taking that option), a couple of examples of its use, better if you come up with them yourself.
It's very intense, and one can get deeply immersed in the flow, so pay attention to the clock: there's a very high risk of Tetris Effect/Just... One... More... Word... effect taking place. Like going to the gym, you need to pace yourself: if you go everyday for two weeks and then give up for three months, we won't be achieving much. Keep it at six hours weekly maximum if you're doing this on the side, three hours is a reasonable rate.
The next step would be, once you're fairly confident you won't make a fool of yourself, to join a forum where topics you care a lot about are discussed very seriously, and then trying to contribute to the discussion. This will force you to write a lot, very quickly, and your interlocutors will be very unforgiving of mistakes, so you'll be very motivated to check and double check. Giving a teacher a sloppy piece is simply laziness, giving it to a discussion board is an affront.
I focus this much on the written media because that's where you'll get the most information bandwidth, so to speak, and because it's both easier to pick apart and to put together than the oral language, kind of like the difference between a turn-based game and a real-time strategy game. Subtitled movies can be a fun, low intensity tool, but the difficulty when learning languages other than English is to find versions with good subtitles (you DO NOT WANT the bad subtitles).
But you may well have to learn to speak the language properly, and one of the fast ways of improving one's ability to learn languages is, well, singing. Usually there's opportunities to join a choir for free (especially if you're okay with church-y environments), and they're a wonderful learning opportunity for beginners. The more you master voice and rhythm, tone and timbre, the easier you will find it to attune yourself to any particular language's set of sounds and paces.
And know this: the more languages you learn, the easier it becomes to learn more. Additionally, the same way learning programming languages helps you clarify the way you think and pattern your thoughts more logically, learning new human languages will give you a firmer grasp of the metaphors on which it is all built, and a better understanding of both universal human psychology, and your own language (like Monsieur Jourdain, who found out to his great amazement that, his whole life, he had been speaking in prose... but, hopefully, what you find out will be more meaningful in all sorts of ways).
I used this technique to learn to read German in about 300 hours (1 hour / day for a year).
However I could not find a way to use it to learn Chinese or Japanese, where reading is very hard and dictionary lookup is very slow due to the non-phonetic characters. I would love to find a way around this.
Lookup will accelerate over time. For example, while the characters are non-phonetic, there are many characters with the same pinyin (minus the tones). Just by looking at a character and noticing that it is similar in shape to one you already know the pinyin for, you can often guess that the pinyin will be the same. For example, "据 剧 居" are all "ju" (with different tones) in Chinese, so by knowing one, you can easily look up the other two. There are probably even more, but these are the 3 I'm familiar with at the moment.
Another option w...