Stephen Robertson

Hi, polyglot speaking here: best way to study any language is A) 'situational' learning. The way I would explain it is that the brain connects vocabulary with situations. For example, if you always study words at your desk your brain connects the words with that situation (at your desk, in your room, calm environmet - highly artifical situation relative to language) and hence won't be able to retrieve them in the real world situation, at least not fast enough. Learn words in applicable situation. When you mix up words, use nmemonics. B) Second, always learn new words in set phrases and ideally in different tenses (depending on language) or modalities (interrogatives, commands, questions etc.). This way, you can bypass grammar. Studying grammar by itself is only useful for writing but having to think about grammar in spoken language is too slow. A) + B) solve that problem naturally. Also, try to speak fast. This solves many pronounciation issues. The higher data rate (more information per unit of time) gives the listener's brain more clues to piece together what you try to say even without correct pronouciation (as long as it is not too off). This is particular useful in 'tonal' languages like Mandarin or Vietnamese which can be exceptionally hard for Western people to master due to lack of tones in their mother tongues: when you have a language background without tones you're brain outright refuses to differentiate since it was trained to compress income signals. You have to break that mechanism first before you can hear the different tones EXCEPT if you had musical training during young age (D). (E) Repeat, repeat, repeat: switch to the language you're studying as often as possible. You can talk to yourself if there is nobody around you can talk to. Nowadays you can talk to AI. AI can correct you. The most imortant is that YOU speak. Above allows everyone to study any language regardless of age. In essence it's how kids acquire language. However, (D) will make a GIANT difference. So if you want your kid to have it easy studying new languages, make sure it trains on a classical instruments from early age. This will pay enormous dividends in language acquisition.