What are the best resources for learning how to speak a language?

I'm going to give you some advice that I hope you take to heart. Your study process, meaning what you do with the material, is far more important than having "the best resource".

If all you are doing is using a resource, you will not learn the language very well at all. You have to cultivate a better process to work with the resources you have.

  1. You have to learn actively. Guess at the meanings of words before you look them up as this will help the meaning stick. This is why people feel that learning a word in context helps them remember it better. It's not a magic component of context that helps, it's the the act of struggling with the meaning before the meaning is made clear.

  2. Use and review the material that you learn in an iterative way. Integrate material you have already learned into the process of learning new material. If you learned vocabulary for family members last week and you are learning the past tense, write about your family when you were growing up. If the next week, you are learning about dates and times write a few paragraphs talking about your family from 1800 to the present (even if it's fiction). This creates a web of concepts in your mind and is superior to learning things in isolated sets.

  3. Seek feedback regularly. Ask native speakers to help you and evaluate your progress. Test yourself to get a reality check. You will convince yourself that you know the material you have covered because when you review the book it seems familiar. This is a lie. The way you know that you know the material is by using it in unfamiliar situations. Use practice tests and fill-in-the blank exercises to check your progress. You must actually take the tests and do the exercises. If you don't actually go through the process of writing in the answers, you can trick yourself into thinking you know the answers better than you actually do.

This sort of learning is hard because you have to face the fact of your learning and not how you wish it to be. Too many people use their resources to the point where they can almost recite it from heart but then when faced with a native speaker, they can't produce. It's because they mistake familiarity with the text for mastery of the concepts. Take a look at the progress that u/shiner_man made in just 90 days. He made his own flashcards, Of course you don't want resources that are crap, but at a certain point the way you work is far more important than having "the best" course.

Read these books:

Fluent Forever, Gabriel Wyner

Make it Stick, Peter C. Brown

/r/languagelearning Thread