I switched all my videogame languages to German and played on German servers (for mmos)

Seems like I should know an answer to this, as English isn’t my first language, but I have no fucking idea how I picked it up. I never made any serious attempt (i.e.: studying for more than a week) to learn it.

Immersion is pretty universally thought to be the best way, and English immersion is easy.

If I’m in the picture depends heavily on how much you need to know. Do I have enough to get by at a basic level if I was suddenly in a Russian-speaking country? Probably. Can I make heads or tails of the poetic-bookish stuff? Hell no. And even that took a lot of study and practice; there really weren’t shortcuts.

So, if you do Ukrainian, first probably don’t, because they all speak Russian anyway, and expect to solo study many hundreds of hours over years to get anywhere.

Play a videogame like Skyrim or fallout with native language subtitles and target language as game language. You pick a lot up quick.

Exposure and immersion is really key. Things like taking weekly lessons are a good start to get your basics down, but once you know those basics and you can understand a simple “Hello/How are you/What did you do last weekend?” conversation, you know enough to start reading children’s books, watching simpler TV shows, etc. I’ve tried learning Polish and French for ages, it wasn’t until I had media in both that I liked that allowed me to have constant daily exposure that my language improved.

My two secret weapons were reality TV and YouTubers. It exposes you a lot more to casual speech, and accents/dictation that are more varied than what you get in most educational material or scripted TV. Also easier to find specific dialects, like Quebecois French, which can make a big difference (learning France French is a good start for understanding Quebec French, but you’ll be completely unprepared if you’ve learned on nice, clean, Parisian accented French, and then try to listen to someone with a thick Montreal accent). News is also a good thing to watch or read, especially reading international news so that you can see reporting on events you’re already familiar with.

Things like Duolingo are basically useless beyond simple vocabulary development. The phrasing they use is often unnatural, and their automatically generated content isn’t reviewed for grammatical correctness. Flash cards are way better, but depends heavily on whether those are good sources of learning for you (I find them generally useless, I struggle with ADHD too much). Podcasts can be okay, but you have to really be far into a language before just listening to someone speak continuously with no visual cues is comfortable for you.

practice

I acquired English by immersing in content that I found engaging and interesting for large amounts of time daily over multiple years. Currently have a C2 certificate, though I do sometimes make mistakes while outputting.

I recommend reading these if you want to learn more about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis
https://tatsumoto.neocities.org/blog/table-of-contents (you can skip japanese specific stuff [including Anki if it’s not a CJK language], and I’d not touch his community chats because of the insane amounts of racism and pedophilia in them)

It’s really easy if you move to a country where this language is spoken and study a lot.

I grew up bilingual (Spanish & English) but now am well into learning French. It helps that I live in a country with a lot of French speakers. I got to B1 (conversational) in about 2 years but it took a loooot of work on top of knowing a similar language. You really need to be around native or advanced speakers in order to learn it, otherwise you’ll just learn to read and understand it but won’t have the confidence to communicate with it

Another thing to understand is that learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a lifelong commitment. As long as you’re learning at least one thing a day and retaining it, you’re doing well

Alors, j’ai trouvé que cette langue est vraiment jolie. Je trouve l’expérience d’apprentissage très agréable (mais pas sans difficulté), et j’adore que j’ai une nouvelle chaîne pour parler avec mes amis. C’est quelque chose de spécial!

I wish we as society could simply have one language to overcome language barriers, but that’s more of a content for my daydreaming.

We sort of do. English. I say sort of, because obviously its not 100% but its the closest thing we have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_lingua_franca

In my country, we have two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. Finnish is the main language but everyone has to learn Swedish as well. But we also have mandatory English lessons and in fact, we teach more English than Swedish, even though Swedish is a official language and English is not. I learned English from grade 3 to grade 9, Swedish from grade 7 to grade 9. I also took voluntary German and French, but I’ve forgotten most of those.

As to to your main question, the best way to learn a language is to use it. Duolingo and such apps are pretty much useless, they get you started, but if you don’t use the language you might as well be memorizing random words.

It takes time to learn a language. Some are easier for speakers of certain languages/language families, but they all take time and effort. Get study material, find what strategy works for you, and chip away at it daily. An SRS (such as Anki) can be good for vocab.

My second language was German - then I was forced to pick up a third in high school. It was English…
I sucked in both those mainly because I didn’t want to learn. I chalk it up for my undiagnosed dyslexia - that didn’t help to make it fun at all.

What made me to stick to English is: everything was English on the Internet, all the games and so on.
Then I wanted to read some not yet translated book series so went to read in English. I wasn’t speaking it.
Then moved to the big old USA and now I’m 99% English only. I do understand some German but ohh boy did it move into passive knowledge…

So when you have no choice you will learn. (Tho there are so many people who don’t speak English and proud of it… That’s the one thing I can’t wrap my head around. How can be proud of your refusal to learn.)

Edit: forgot to recommend something - I believe it is phenomenal in some cases: language transfer I tried the English to Spanish and it is amazing for a native English speaker - hut there is value for non native speaker also!

At 21 I learned spanish by taking 20 hours of classes a week for 3 months and a buch of self study afterwards.

Now at 38 I’ve been trying to learn Hindi for a couple of years already, but progress is much slower than when I was younger. It also doesn’t help that there are a lot less learning materials for Hindi.

My husband learned English through a mix of watching a lot of television, English classes as a child, and then immersion by living someplace where English is the primary language. He says a lot of it was kinda programmed in from absorbing it throughout his life, but his English got perfected when he moved.

I started learning French when I was 12 which I’ve continued into adulthood.

What I’ve learned after leaving highschool and learning it on my own is that the book version of the language is very much not useful if you actually want to understand native speakers.

In real life people blend sounds together and use a bunch of slang and the books really don’t teach that, so when I started learning listening skills post-highschool, it kind of felt like I starting over from square one to a degree.

I really recommend that you start with listening and speaking skills first before moving on to reading and writing. That’s the order we all learned our first language in and it still works really well for learning your second or third. The way languages are taught in schools really feels backwards to me.

I’ve been learning little bits of Japanese here and there and starting with listening first feels so much easier. I also feel like it really helps with pronunciation as well since I’m copying native speakers.

for me it’s reading lots. then, it’s hours of watching TV copying how toastmasters do it. then you start to feel you ain’t street and talking all boujee.