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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

Well it depends how much time you have to put into it...

Buy (or pirate, but really, you should buy them if you can afford it, they’re great) the entire set of Pimsleur French tapes. There are 90, each 30 mins long. Do one tape every day. Note that this will take you longer than 90 days as you are supposed to repeat tapes when you don’t remember ~80% of the content.

Concurrently, get Anki (flashcard program) and find a French vocabulary deck ordered by frequency. Learn as many new words per day as you have time for. Do all your required reviews every day.

Concurrently, spend as much time as you can every day reading or listening to appropriate material and trying to understand it. Search for “French graded reader” for some good books to buy.

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To add on to these great suggestions I'd also say speak to people. Go on Italki or HelloTalk. Caveman brute force a 5 min conversation if you have to but imo speaking asap is essential and using the resources above + a frequency list can get you through the the first 5 minutes of conversation very quickly.

I think a lot of language learns focus too much on vocabulary and grammar when starting out but they don't take the time to drill/ use the vocabulary they are learning in actual conversation. There is no point in passively knowing 1000 words if you can barely use 100 in an active conversation.

Another resource that I like but wouldn't recommend it unless it was on sale is the mimic method. Learning the phonetics and how to hear/create the unique sounds of your target language is really important but it's too expensive for what you get imo.

You can probably also rent these tapes from your local library!

I also recommend Pimsleur. Unlike with Duolingo, I feel like I can actually produce new sentences with the constructions that I've practiced with Pimsleur. Of course, Duolingo covers more vocabulary, but with Pimsleur I feel like I can actually speak the words and produce new sentences, not just type/recognise them.

(I've also heard Assimil is a good alternative to Pimsleur.)

This is what I did for Pimsleur Spanish. I recommend Pimsleur.

Same here. I only wish there were more Spanish levels. I have gone through all of them but now I am stuck at a still very basic level.

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