I learned French in one year by hooking up a mic/mixer to my laptop (so that I could easily hear myself speak) and watching French DVDs with French subtitles, pausing after every sentence and repeating what was said.<p>I'd rewind the film and switch to English subtitles when I didn't understand a phrase. It takes about 6 hours per film at first, but becomes faster and faster as you learn more vocabulary/grammar and get used to the process.<p>It's best to use real French films, because it's important that the actor's mouth movements match their voice, especially when they're speaking fast.<p>I live in Paris now, and speak French fairly well with no American accent.<p>I also read bilingual books and memorized songs on the bus (pasted the lyrics into iTunes so they'd show up on my iPod when listening to the song).
From <a href="http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about" rel="nofollow">http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about</a><p>"In June 2004, at the ripe old age of 21, all post-pubescent and supposedly past my mental/linguistic prime, I started learning Japanese. By September 2005, I had learned enough to read technical material, conduct business correspondence and job interviews in Japanese. By the next month, I landed a job as a software engineer at a large Japanese company in Tokyo"<p>Basically, his method involved constantly immersing himself in Japanese media.
If you want to learn to speak French and use it actively, not just to prepare for some exam, I can recommend French In Action from my experience. It is a base for a 2-year course at Yale University. The whole course revolves around a story about an American student on vacation in France, a French girl, and their families. A complete multimedia course consisting of 52 30-minute video episodes with commentaries, 2 textbooks (500 pages of transcripts, visual aids and readings), 2 workbooks (1000 pages of exercises), 1700 audio files aiding the workbook and 2 study guides (400 pages). There is material for roughly 2 hours a day study for year and a half, but it'll get you to the level where you can easily live in France (or Quebec :).
The Peace Corps of my youth taught the volunteers to speak the new language by 3 months of total immersion, then threw them into the wild. My friends who had gone through the process said that they could get by, but it took a year to become totally fluent.<p>I picked up enough Portuguese to fumble along in Brazil by taking 40 hours of lessons from Berlitz, 2 hours per day twice a week, just me and the teacher. That was kind of the minimum to make continuous progress. Group classes are way less effective, and courses at the local JC are totally worthless. The only thing that counts is how much time you actually spend speaking.<p>It's expensive as hell, but I strongly recommend 100 hours of individual instruction before going off on your own in learning. It gives you a good feel for the pronunciation of the language. If you learn by reading but with the wrong pronunciation, it may take a long time to recover. The proof to me was when I was in rural northeastern Brazil. The person that I was haltingly talking to said that he could tell that I was from Rio by my accent. I wasnt, but my teacher was.
Language learning is such a VAST and ignored area in start-up community. I'm also learning French and while Rosseta Stone is the mainstream software it's practically a wasteland with small occasional gems like <a href="http://babbel.com" rel="nofollow">http://babbel.com</a> ( which is very nice Adobe Flex application).
Anyone finding a quick and a fun way to learn a language will become an instant billionaire :)
But I guess it's the general problem of knowledge learning and is as old as the human race exist. Imagine building something that has a possibility of destroying the current concept of school! For now all we have is sci-fi stories about swallowing pills for instant learning ....<p>P.S.
I wrote a little Adobe Air application for someone who likes to learn a language while listening to songs or watching youtube. You can search lyrics/save/translate and bookmark your videos. It's a just organizes the whole process. Have fun !
<a href="http://www.singandstudy.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.singandstudy.com</a>
If you're planning to live in Quebec, then French skills are critical. Lots of points for immigration/selection, and things just aren't in English outside of Montreal. If, however, you're trying for someplace like Vancouver, French is less important.<p>I think various websites publish the skill set(s) the country and/or provinces are looking for. It's trivial for a US-ian to get work here, and it's a 3-6 month process for Europeans to do so (at least in software-related businesses). It also helps if you're young, single, ...
Not to rain on his parade, and congratulations to him in achieving a personal, verifiable goal, but learning French as a native speaker of Russian who already had huge exposure to English is less remarkable than learning a non-Indo-European language for him. It is also more remarkable if a speaker of a non-Indo-European language learns English (or French), which I have seen done more than once.<p>But more power to anyone who takes the time and effort to learn another language well.
Wow! Fabulous link. Thank you. It just so happens that I am in Montreal at this very moment. I came here for the weekend to get away from Chicago. I am thinking seriously about moving out of the United States to either Montreal or Paris. I have decided to start taking French lessons at Alliance Francaise de Chicago (<a href="http://af-chicago.org/" rel="nofollow">http://af-chicago.org/</a>) this summer, and I have "acquired" MP3 albums of French lessons from the Interwebs. I will try the methods suggested in the article and in the comments here. Thanks again.
Any recommendations on learning to speak and understand japanese without learning kanji? I hated studying kanji while taking japanese language courses in undergrad.