Becoming great with foreign languages

Yep. Try things like mentally translating billboards or other reading that's designed to be simple.

Also, travel. Use it. I've found it's really enhances the experience if I can speak--even just a little bit, like "please", "thank you", "how do you say?"--and get more of an authentic feel for the culture.

Plus, people have told me they appreciate the effort, and are more willing to reciprocate and help then.

I recently signed up with Babbel, got 6 months at a discount I believe and 6 months free so a year for all languages.

My main idea is to learn Russian (I took level 1 back in college but didn't take learning seriously) and to brush up my Spanish (I got a 96 on the state exam after junior year in high school, so I was fairly proficient).

I barely know English...

the wife is trying to learn Sign Language, but she already speaks three languages.

fluency is not enough

Use it or lose it. I did two at school, Spanish for five years, German for three, but despite getting better results in the former I recall more of the latter on account of being in more situations where I need to use the language.

Additionally I have heard that watching TV that you already know that is dubbed into the language you want but subtitled in English can be fairly effective. In general just use the things that we have today to your advantage, when I was learning we had no Duolingo or near infinite video resources of people speaking our destination language, we used cassette tapes

I wonder if passive learning can be transitioned into more active learning. The reason is I won't live forever, and it takes a while to survey subjects casually, slowly developing critical understanding of the topic.

Thanks for replies guys. The billboard one, looking for easy phrasings to translate especially with visual clues. Feel free to share in detail how Babbel goes and what it's like to use, A.I.M. .

I truly did one time look at a list of vocabulary, raising my hand to speak in Freshman year, only to proclaim, "Tu Madre es Facil!" , getting a roar of approval from my peers. That was my shining moment with foreign language. The rest of the class was spent inscribing vocabularly words into my desk before quizzes, being afforded the chance to cheat by a teacher who told us lavish stories of her travels.

Yes, making dirty jokes is one of the best ways to learn. You never forget any of the words you used

Also, like the TV you already know suggestion, try kids books in your target language. You likely already know the story, it has illustrations to help you get context, and such books are usually written in simple, clear language

I decided to learn a programing language instead, but I was thinking about a foreign language. The input I received from several others when I was thinking about learning a foreign language was interesting. One person told me if my goal was not to learn how to read/write the foreign language, but only to speak, it would be rather easy as many illiterate people speak just fine. And this person and others told me to listen to Pimsleur audio files for just this reason. Furthermore, I don't remember the exact numbers, but someone else told me that the goal is to get to about a 500 word vocabulary and you are in reasonably good shape. And when you double or triple that, then you mostly done.

If you goal is becoming "great", might as well give up if you're an adult. Unless you have massive pressure (e.g. refugee in a foreign country), it's just not going to happen. Gotta set your sights lower. Something like "communicate pretty well in most situations" seems like a more reasonable goal.

this 100%

I think it's very possible to become great, but not with foreign languages. I don't see why a foreign language would make anyone great.

Duolingo has helped me get to conversational+ in spanish. I don't at all rate 'grinding vocab' as a way to improve. You'd possibly be better off just watching spanish tv or films with english subtitles and letting that osmose than grinding vocab.

You just have to make sure to use the language a little every day, or as often as possible, passive is important but you need to start making output, too, preferrably to a living thing

Language Transfer is what you are looking for, if the language has connections to English.

https://www.languagetransfer.org/

There's some old German guy who had a similar system that I forgot.

The basic idea is that you learn some stuff that you just have to learn, like conjugation. But this is supplemented greatly by learning rules that allow you to "find" a ton of words you don't even know.

E.g. Almost always, English words ending in ity are the same as Spanish words ending in idad. Electricity, electricidad. Opportunity, oportunidad.

Bang, you know a ton of Spanish words. Or can find, them anyway. I once spontaneously used the word
'Coloquial' in Spanish with this method. Though I can't really follow a TV show well.

It focuses on teaching you to communicate and understand as much as possible so you can start speaking and work on perfecting things later.

Most systems do the opposite, demanding perfect spelling and grammar from the start, as if your ultimate goal is to do translations of Henry James, rather than be able to get by.