Are there any books that write about effective ways to learn language...

Are there any books that write about effective ways to learn language? I don't necessarily mean a "how to speak x language" since there's plenty of those, but I mean more something regarding general techniques, preferably written by somebody who learned several languages. You see some polyglots who speak tons of different languages / pick them up fast, perhaps some of this is intuitive but I'm sure there's some techniques too.

Pic related is the kind of book I mean, but it was just the first hit on "books on learning a language" so I dunno if there's any that have a reputation for being exceptional.

The best ways to study a language will always be to grind grammar until your eyes bleed.

This is incidentally also why most people quit learning them, because grammar tends to be the most exhausting and annoying part of languages.

Huh? For me it's always been vocabulary. You get a feeling for grammar pretty quickly.

I think grinding grammar and inmersion for lexicon/general fluency is as straightforward as it gets. The theory behind learning a language is not complicated, but it's an awful load of work.
The more languages you know the easier it seems to learn new ones though, as many structures and lexicon is shared, specially between close language families.

Source: Fluent (native or almost native level) in 4 languages and learning my 5th language right now

Reading helps a lot and it's fun.
Also spending time in the country or with natives.
Watching films and hearing music does fuck all for me, and word lists are just infuriating

Yeah, I do that. I'm too lazy for word lists.

My girlfriend speaks 3 languages but thinks in Serbian, also speaks it in her sleep, scary language.

She dreams only sweet dreams of removing kebab.

>You get a feeling for grammar pretty quickly.

Maybe it depends upon which language it is, but languages with a case system always seem to take me a long time with grammar, and also getting the gist of word order for long sentence structures.

While we're here, anything good for learning French? I'm using duolinguo but I'm trying to grind out at least acceptable levels of fluency by the end of the year.

>Reading helps a lot and it's fun.
What's the German Hemmingway? Someone known for simple prose and not too complicated vocabulary (I'm reading on a kindle tho so that helps). I have just finished Momo but I want to start reading some more serious short stories.

Kafka

I have a perfect method for you. Not even memeing: Get a significant other who speaks the language you want to learn.

My bf of 4 years is an Arab and he helped me learn Arabic better than any class I took. You get free practice, and a shit ton of motivation. If they're worth dating, they'll support you and encourage you to keep practicing no matter what. They'll usually be flattered that you're interested in their culture and reward you with some nice sex, too.

It doesn't get any better than that.

Thanks, I actually enjoy most of his page-long stories and allegories and I never thought of re-reading them in German.

Are you by any chance Swedish?

Here we go again

No, American of Dutch descent. I will, however, admit that I have such raging sand fever that I might as well be Swedish.

I'm also a dude, so that's another 5 Swedish points for me.

Absorb as many vocab words as you can. Use a combination of Memrise and Duolingo. Read a lot. Practice talking. That's it.

>My girlfriend speaks 3 languages but thinks in Serbian
If she says she speaks serbian, croatian and bosnian she's memeing you. Some nigger tried to pull that one on me before

>learn Russian
>spend one week studying Ukrainian

now you know 2 new languages

I've actually read this and it's quite helpful, give it a try.

ARE YOU ASSUMING LANGUAGE? First thing you do is memorize the writing system first. Not everyone wants to learn a language with Latin script! The next thing you do is memorize 5000 words, then you can watch anime.

Man, grammar is the easy part. You study a 200-700pages book and basically you are done. At this point I can study a grammar in a couple of months.

Vocabulary and common expressions are much harder. You go very fast at the beginning because you are learning the most common 3000 words that occur 80% of the time or something like that, and you see progress every day.

But then in order to really understand everything you must grind through another 10-20000 words, every single one of which appears practically never. Even if you memorize 100 new words a day it seems like you are making no progress.

>But then in order to really understand everything you must grind through another 10-20000 words, every single one of which appears practically never. Even if you memorize 100 new words a day it seems like you are making no progress.


It just seems overwhelming on paper. A lot of those words are just derivatives from basic words. Also, if it's a European language, there'll be a lot of internationalisms.

It's just my experience. The first time I realized that it made no difference to me whether I read something in English or in my native language, I tested how many english words I knew (not counting different forms of the same word) and it was around 20.000, so that's the number I'm aiming to when I learn a new language.

At the moment I'm studying German, and I've memorized a list with the 5000 most common words (plus I've certainly learned other ones randomly while reading), but I must use the dictionary heavily, even if I'm just reading a children's book.