I teach English as a second language & I remember in grad school that research did NOT support teaching grammar as meaningful in language acquisition. What DOES work is graded reading which means taking the simplest of STORIES (but they MUST BE INTERESTING) & learning them w/a tutor one-on-one & progressing to higher…

If bilingualism was only about knowing a second language to some limited extent, basicly all nonnative speakers of English were bilingual since we all learn English. And besides, it's not exactly news that you learn a new language sufficiently fast by studying for four hours a day. The question remains how to…

25508 words in Russian covers 99% of what you read? That seems like a lot - does it include verb conjugations in different tenses?

There's one great site I'm missing here: busuu.com. You can learn a great deal of languages there (and they're still expanding the number of languages) and practice it at the same time by using their conversation platform, instead of giving away your accountdetails as with Skype. You can even practice your language…

Vocabulary.com is the awesome-st way to learn new words! Its fully free :)

As a bilingual individual, I have to say this advice is ludicrous. If you want to learn a simple language, with lots of English cognates, then this might be a good method. If you want to actually learn a language (including Spanish) it actually takes about 6 months to achieve "fluency." Take a look at the Defense…

Great idea, but you may want to specify that it only has Spanish and Brazillian Portuguese

My biggest issue with Rosetta Stone was that it was sometimes hard to know precisely what I was saying. You see a picture (a kid jumping into a pool, for example) and get a corresponding phrase to say. There was no English translation for the phrase. I had taken a couple of years of Japanese, so I knew the basic…

This post should possibly be renamed "learning a language in 90 days if you're rich as hell". Hiring private tutors and moving to another country are possibly beyond the scope of what most people can feasibly do.

Well, sort of the point of the associations being circuit-based rather than space-based is that more than one thing can be stored in the same space. Not to mention that while there may be a finite number of associations that the brain can create, your lifespan is also finite - humans don't live long enough to reach…

Fortunately, you can't use up all your brain. I'm up to 4 languages and still have room for vet school.

I don't think you should be scared about "using up your brain". What worries me more is the time and effort required, and the rewards of that labor. 4 hours a day for 3 months is a lot of work. You need to decide if the rewards are worth it; and if your time is better spent on something else. This is why I think…

This is pretty sound advice. I attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California for two separate languages and we learned the hard way that "total immersion," or basically living the language is the only way to learn it well, and learn it rapidly. You need the academics to learn the grammar rules and…

Better yet, just go to that country. When everyone speaks Chinese and you're hungry after a 12 hour flight, you learn to ask for food pretty quick.

This really isn't a new concept. Immersion is both the fastest and most practical way to understand and retain a new language, and this comes as no surprise considering that any skill you "learn" will quickly dwindle away without any practice. Books and Memorization software are good at teaching you vocabulary, but…

Thanks to this retarded new comment system, I almost missed your post, but I'm glad I looked through them all. Thank you for that suggestion, as Japanese is certainly the language I would choose, and ironically is far harder to learn using this article's suggestions since it doesn't have any of the same roots as…

I was told the best way to learn a new language is to be dropped off in a country where the language is spoken the majority of the time/places. It was said that you'll be surprised how quick you learn when your survival depends on it.

Sounds super easy. Just 4 steps that include moving to another country where only that language is spoken, getting a private tutor for 4 hours a day, and not speaking English. Where do I sign? :-|

You've given some great suggestions; thanks for the article. I'd really like to share this with the students in my basic and intermediate Spanish classes, but I'm going to have to correct a number of typos first! (e.g., "spanish" and "The fact is that we not taught languages in the ideal way.") It's my experience that…