I had the same problem when learning English; at least when I had to learn vocabulary for school (my native language is Spanish, so English would be our foreign language class). Later on I had the chance to take a couple of classes in Latin.
For the last two years I've been learning French with great success. I've not yet found out how it is it was so easy for me; I suspect it came from it being close-to-isomorphic with Spanish. The thing is, when learning vocabulary I found that knowing a little bit about the use (not necessarily the definition) of English words helped me a lot to derive the meaning... (read more)
I had the same problem when learning English; at least when I had to learn vocabulary for school (my native language is Spanish, so English would be our foreign language class). Later on I had the chance to take a couple of classes in Latin.
For the last two years I've been learning French with great success. I've not yet found out how it is it was so easy for me; I suspect it came from it being close-to-isomorphic with Spanish. The thing is, when learning vocabulary I found that knowing a little bit about the use (not necessarily the definition) of English words helped me a lot to derive the meaning... (read more)