Do you think language learning is hard and unpleasant? Then you probably do it the wrong way. It will always require attention and time to learn something new, but the process can be fun (yes, fun!) and fast.

How to Learn Any Language by Barry Farber is a cheap book full of useful tips. Especially if you want to make language learning more fun. This post gives additional tips that the book doesn’t specifically mention.

Practicing over a glass of beer
Obviously the most important thing when you learn a language is to practice (why don’t schools understand this?). Try to immerse yourself in the language. There are lots of fun and free ways to do this, such as doing a language exchange with someone who speaks the language you want to learn and wants to learn a language you speak.

You can post such a proposal on JustLanded or UniLang and find someone near you with whom you can practice over a glass of beer (that’s better than a dull classroom!). Or use one of the other websites that offer this service. Practicing on a distance with Skype or with a chat program is possible as well of course.

Digital flashcards
Usually there’s a lot of room for improvement in how people rehearse words and grammar rules. At least I wish I found this solution before! This is the idea: take a flashcard for every word, rule, saying or other bit of information you want to remember. Write that information on one side of the card. Write the translation, answer or whatever applies on the other side of the card. Now you can use the flashcards to rehearse yourself. You can take them wherever you are and use “lost” time to practice your language.

If you learn a lot of words, another solution is much more practical however: Anki. It’s a free cross-platform program and website that uses the digital equivalent of flashcards and intelligently chooses the order in which it shows them to you. The order is based on how well you know a card. So simple and so effective.

Prioritizing
How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months focuses on efficiency and the Pareto principle in true Ferrissean style. This is good advice for language learning: choose the purpose you have for learning a language and learn what you need to reach that goal. That may include specialized vocabulary or it may just be the 500 most used words and some basic grammar to make yourself understood. If you’re feeling really lazy, just learn 10 words and buy a Picture Dictionary.