Ask HN: How did you really learn a foreign language?

Textbooks and traditional classrooms are way back on the curve. They prioritize the organizational problems of schools instead of the learning needs of students.

You're already at a disadvantage since you're not seven years old (five to seven is the best age to learn a language, according to linguists), so you're gonna need to make up some ground. Aside from picking a learning program to pick up vocabulary, you need to practice, and do it in as many ways as you can.

Some suggestions I/friends have used:

Mass Media. Start buying a Spanish-language newspaper and reading articles (specifically, articles that you don't know what they're about) with a dictionary in hand. The first few you do will take an hour each for a two-line article. But as you do this for longer times, you'll start to pick up words - and (mainstream, well-regarded) newspapers are great because they've generally got very clear writing. When you get confident, start trying to read the letters or editorials. You should also dedicate an hour of the day to watching news or a soap opera on Univision (doesn't matter if you don't understand it at first - pay attention and you'll pick it up), and pick up a Spanish radio station to start listening to.

Computers. Set your OS's language to Spanish, and set Spanish as the preferred language of your browser (so it will request es pages before en ones). When you don't understand a web page, get out the dictionary and work through it. Try and limit yourself to Spanish sites as much as possible, and (most importantly) read all your online news in Spanish.

People. If you can find some people to speak to in Spanish on a daily basis, do this. To complement this, find a local cafe/restaurant that has acceptable food and Spanish-speaking staff, and become a regular there. Practice at home, and then go there an order in Spanish. Do this a lot (hence the OK food). After you're feeling OK about this, go to this place at off-hours, order something (in Spanish, of course) and try to make some small talk. These people should be familiar with you by this point, and be amenable to talking to a customer (since they don't have anything else to do). At first, they'll likely respond to your broken Spanish in English - either respond back only Spanish, or ask them to speak Spanish to you directly. They see this as being nice and helpful; they're not trying to insult your skills, and will likely accommodate you if you ask (and they recognize you).

- Try to get the same sort of input infants get - interactive, highly repetitive and patterned. That's optimal for language learning.

- Repeat at spaced intervals, and organise the material. You can organise by looking for patterns in words, or by making up sentences containing a word, etc. Personalise the words and make them yours. Having an affective reaction to the word ("I like the sound of this word") can also help you remember.

- For recalcitrant words, use mnemonic techniques. The best strategy is the keyword technique, e.g. to remember the Spanish "caerse" (to fall (down)) you could say "He fell down and cursed". Try to make it something you can visualise.

- Reading books you like and choose to read on your own accord is as good as in-class vocabulary instruction (at least for L1 acquisition - there's been less research on reading in L2 acquisition). But, you need to be able to read at least 95% of the words to not get frustrated at having to look everything up in the dictionary. Of course, if you're passionate about whatever you're reading, you could know 10% and still plough through it.

- Listen to music. A tune + words is much easier to learn than words alone. From that, you can memorise and reuse sentence structures and new words. Also, popular music tends to use more colloquial expressions, which helps to learn informal language not covered by textbooks.

Personally, I've been learning Japanese recently and have learned more just from a textbook, watching anime/drama and reading manga than in the equivalent year of classroom Arabic I took - subjectively speaking. Some specific things I've been doing that seem to have helped:

- I've been using Anki for spaced repetition vocabulary practice. It's a great piece of open-source software.

- I tend to re-watch specific scenes that I enjoy after a few weeks. I've usually learned something more to better understand what's being said in the interim, which reinforces the usage of the sentence structures and vocabulary used.

- Similarly, I've been reading manga first in English and then in the original. I more or less know from my previous reading and the visual context what they said, so I can work out what each word should mean without looking them up individually.

- I've been writing diaries on lang-8.com and getting them corrected by native speakers. It's a helpful, friendly community, probably quite like LiveMocha but I've never tried the latter. It's focused on writing rather than connecting for conversations on Skype.

- I've been going for the local Japanese language meetup. It's not bad especially when you get a Japanese person who actually will let you practise your Japanese rather than always respond to you in English.

Bottom line, the fact that you're learning Spanish because you want to is your biggest asset. It'll carry you through most of the difficulties of learning a language. Try to expose yourself to material just a little bit beyond what you already know, so you're learning something and not getting frustrated. Whether you call it "flow" (Csikszentmihalyi) or "i+1" (Stephen Krashen) or just plain common sense, it works.