How do I go about learning a language

[bjoern.gumboldt]

Start with the pdf-file that I’ve posted here…

@bjoern.gumboldt

English and Spanish share a common ancestor and there are in fact 29 rules that you could learn to easily know your first 1,000 Spanish words in a couple of hours. I’m always surprised that nobody knows that… 1066 Battle of Hastings… yes, sure that is technically French and not Spanish, but in the end, both of those are just pretty bad Latin…

research.steinhardt.nyu.edu

EngSpCognates.pdf

433.42 KB

ps: I’ve taught English as a foreign language in Spain before (A2/B1 level) and they were always confused as to why nobody’s ever mentioned this list of rules to them before.

My advice: learn the 29 rules in this list to get your first 500-1,000 words. Takes about a day… or make it a weekend for all I care. Do the first 700 words from a frequency dictionary in a week and then switch to tv for another week. Start reading some magazines or whatnot for the second “receptive skill” and eventually have a look at some grammar rules.

Also have a look here for a detailed approach overall:

@bjoern.gumboldt

Start on a weekend and end on a weekend. On Saturday familiarize yourself with the basic grammar of the language and just read over how to build all the tenses, personal pronouns, etc. Don’t try and memorize but just get a general idea, so you’ll know where to look for things later on.

Have a memory palace with 200 locations and a frequency dictionary with the 1,000 most common words. First night 1-200, next morning you review by just walking through your MP. I assume that’s also what @Daniel_360 means by “active recall”… don’t just read over the 200 words in the dictionary again. Next night, 201-400 in the same palace and just replace the images you had from the previous day. Do that for five nights/mornings total for the first 1,000 words.

ps: click the links to read the entire thread