NRR: Good ways to learn a FOREIGN LANGUAGE (other than immersion)?

Duolingo is a good start.

Work your arse off with a language method for a few months in order to make basic conversation possible, then find native speakers willing to meet for conversation (they benefit from your English also). If learning French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, or German, it shouldn't be complicated to find someone unless in the most rural areas.

if you learned a language but have forgotten most of it, watch TV in that language over the internet. Sports and cartoons especially.

The best way is to get a boyfriend or girlfriend who speaks that language and who will teach you.Caution: Some languages are very gender specific. A friend who went to Japan for two years ended up speaking like a woman.

Couple things that have helped me:

1. Going through the textbook and writing down (by hand) everything that I'm reading. This takes a lot of time--especially since I have a handwriting disability--but it helped me get used to certain words' appearing in sequence (more than just repeating them orally did, for some reason). It also made it easier to acquire writing systems that weren't based on the Roman alphabet (Hindi, Cambodian, Japanese).

2. Carry around a 3x5 card all the time. a) If you encounter a new word/phrase in the foreign language, jot it down--or, even better, jot down a whole sample sentence with the word/phrase embedded. b) Otherwise, the card can have some bits of vocabulary and/or syntactical rules that you're currently trying to absorb, and you can pull the card out when you have odd free moments during the day.

I liked the Duolingo suggestion that somebody made. Any other GOOD ONLINE SERVICES that people know? I had a coworker who was fed language tidbits on his phone throughout the day, but I don't know the name of that service.

Years back I took just a course or two of Spanish. I never followed through with becoming fluent. But in retrospect I liked the system. It was a combination of textbook learning along with a very sappy Soap Opera movie produced specifically for the course. So you would study a chapter. Than watch the first installment of the movie where the dialogue would tie into what you had learned in the chapter. Its a good way to hear Spanish being spoken in practice and at a pace you can follow. And as stupid the Soap Opera was, it did have an ongoing plot where you find yourself compelled to find out what happens. A virtuous cycle kicks in of being motivated to learn more Spanish so you find out what happens.

I'm with you in that Americans inherently have a roadblock towards learning other languages. Since English has basically become the universal common language that is all us White Americans hear unless we go out of our way to spend time in communities speaking other languages. That can be expensive. And it seems to me, to become fluent you have to hear the language consistently being spoken.

I used to try to learn languages, as an adult, by memorizing vocabulary lists. This never worked, in part because I could translate but wouldn't remember the foreign word when I was trying to talk. Using flash cards (making them) fixed that. But when I started the flash cards, I did not learn much because I was not picking the right words, some of them were archaic (some I wrote down from Der Zauberberg, not a good choice) and what I understand is better is to write down words surrounding typical situations, so a series on travelling, a series on grocery shopping, and so forth. Watching tv can be good but it is also light on talk in most cases. Talk radio is the way to get massive talk in the foreign language, with stories on certain areas, and it really helps but can be very difficult because there are no visual cues and they tend to speak quickly. Just have it going in the background until it starts to make sense. You can travel and live in Europe much more cheaply than you would think, because if you live with roommates, especially in university dorms, which are subsidized, it can be cheap, and go out drinking with them at the subsidized university pubs and the language will improve. Teach English and you can afford all this. Plus, the dollar is far stronger now than in the last decade, and so it is much cheaper for Americans to go. Norwegian Air has very cheap flights to Europe from the States. But the basic thing is to see how small children learn languages. They talk and talk and talk all day long, to themselves and to others, trying to make the sounds and talking about everything they're doing and seeing. I've seen this method work very well for adult learners as well who are a) immersed in areas with no English speakers and b) talkers who never shut up. They are annoying but they do learn the languages very quickly.

Duolingo is a good start. wrote:

Duolingo is a good start.

Duolingo is awesome! I highly recommend it.

jjjjj wrote:

Yada yada yada.

So OP says his sister can't travel and you say she should travel.

Pimsleur.

Appreciate the suggestions so far, group--thanks!

Ryan Foreman wrote:

Years back I took just a course or two of Spanish. I never followed through with becoming fluent. But in retrospect I liked the system. It was a combination of textbook learning along with a very sappy Soap Opera movie produced specifically for the course. So you would study a chapter. Than watch the first installment of the movie where the dialogue would tie into what you had learned in the chapter. Its a good way to hear Spanish being spoken in practice and at a pace you can follow. And as stupid the Soap Opera was, it did have an ongoing plot where you find yourself compelled to find out what happens. A virtuous cycle kicks in of being motivated to learn more Spanish so you find out what happens.

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Destinos

Yes it's cheesy but that's what helped me the most. I bought old text books on ebay to go with the videos.

Why does she want to learn a foreign language? For conversation? For reading? Both? Just for fun? What language is she trying to learn? What other languages has she learned before, if any, and what seemed to work well for her when she was learning them? It's hard to say what the right approach is without knowing some more information.