How do I learn a language?

But why should reading books come after the learning of words? I think meant with the 2000 most common words you're able to read books with a vocabulary at hand, so that you'll learn more words while doing something useful and entertaining

lol

Yes, I meant exactly that. Obviously 2000 words won't make you fluent but it's enough to brave through foreign literature at a tolerable pace. For example, if you check perseus for latin, you'll see that Ovid's Metamorphoses has roughly 8000 unique words yet 75% of entire text is contained within 1200 of them
perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/vocablist?works=Perseus:text:1999.02.0029&sort=weighted_freq&filt=75&filt_custom=&output=table&lang=la

1. Learn Latin.
2. Every other language becomes 50% easier.
3. Profit.

Sanskrit. Can read the alphabet, and nothing else

> translate everything you see
Don't do this (unless he means grammatically but I am assuming he means in terms of vocabulary). There are times when it is good to try to translate a whole page of something but usually it is better to read something so that you can follow what is happening and not get bogged down into looking up every single word you don't understand. You want to get to reading in bulk as quickly as you can. The problem with translating every single word is that a lot of the words you look up will be uncommon enough that you will never retain it by the time it is used again. Reading as much as you can has you organically learn what words that consistently come up that you don't understand, they make you learn nouns and verbs related to things you are interested in making it easier to read things you want to read, it gets your mind used to actually reading in another language (glowing slowly and translating everything doesn't do this).

The key is after grammar to read as much as you can, both deep reading (what user suggested) and faster reading, and do flash cards. Depending on the language you can be reading The Stranger tier books without too much trouble in a year if you are dedicated enough.

I know 5000 is a ballpark figure but are you counting individual conjugations in that?

best way to learn grammar? do i just get some shitty book?

Conjugations/declensions are a part of grammar, that's why you study it first.

>here are times when it is good to try to translate a whole page of something
Dude, come on. He's talking about like street signs and short phrases you happen to over hear and shit

So, you're not counting that in the 5000?

Do you know Italian? If so, any recommended grammar resources?

anyone else find recognizing a word easier than recalling it

fasted way is to like get just a handful of basics down (like the ten most common verbs or whatever) and then just read books, articles, or essays, looking up every word you don't know.

probably easy tier books at first (even shit like harry potter) and then work your way up

by the end of your first book, you will have learned more than you think

I can only speak for latin (well and my native russian) which is similar I guess. There's no magic trick to grammar, you just get down and cram it until it sticks.

That's everyone. A persons passive vocabulary is always larger than ones active, even for their mother tongue.

This is awful advice. You will look up a word, not understand the explanation because you know fuck all about the grammar.
>If this is the same noun why is the ending different?
>Why is this word at the start of the sentence now?
>I don't even understand the meaning of this word and I can't just look it up because it servers a grammatical function that English doesn't have
etc.

Learn grammar first otherwise nothing makes sense. If you try to do it the way user suggest you will be endless frustrated by almost every single sentence you read.

No, nobody does that.

Everyone on the planet.

K, so do i just get a grammar book

this desu

No, different conjugations/declinations of the same word would count as 1

Yes, I assumed that the 3 steps are more or less parallel. I usually start reading books (super slowly) right away after the first notions of grammar (i.e. structure of the sentence, cases, most common tenses).

5000 is just the target number I try to reach ASAP by using super efficient strategies (like SRS) rather than slowly acquiring them by context. The reason is that it allows you to start enjoying some simple native material.

this tbf

You can't learn 5000 words if you haven't started reading. What do you do, learn thousands of words just out of lists? That's for pure autists with photographic memory. I could start Xenopho with footnotes with a vocabulary of less than a thousand words. Just READ.

You should start reading as soon as possible, but your first 5000 words should be learned with Anki. Try it. It will take care of what you need to learn and to review so that you shouldn't think about it, and it will push things more and more into your long term memory.

It is super efficient and doesn't require any autism.

Duolingo, language learning books, (there are plenty), a pen and a scrapbook.

And get started. It's literally that simple.

>but your first 5000 words should be learned with Anki
I hate when you guys say this shit. Do you want people to make 5k flashcards or just pray there's a decent set already for the language you're learning. And why Anki in particular, does it just happen to be the best flashcard kind of thing?

Anki is for weebs only.

+1, Dumb fgt.

Not Bengali?

Greek and German

I've always found a good set with the top 5000 words for all the languages I've studied. You can also import memrises courses with an Anki plugin.

>And why Anki in particular, does it just happen to be the best flashcard kind of thing?

Well, it's just that it has all the features you could ask for but no frills. If you don't want to delve into technical details you can just have it present the flashcards you need to study that day and click how well you remembered it, and it will manage everything for you.

It is also available as a windows/linux program, as a website and as a mobile app, and all of them synchronize via your ankiweb account.