Recap | How to study a language

The key to enjoying study (even if enjoying study sounds like an oxymoron to you) is to do it autonomously, exploratively, and deliberately; instead of doing homework drills for days on end in a mind-wandering state.

The subject of your study should arise from personal needs, experiences, and stories of your choosing. Bite-sized disconnected phrases illustrating a particular grammar rule or idiom can be practical sometimes, but only in small doses. With that in mind:

Start with vocabulary and pronunciation.
Use active memorization techniques.
Develop your phonetic awareness.
Learn the basics of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
When studying pronunciation think sounds, not words (or meaning).
Study enough grammar to not hold you back.
Put special attention to features that either don’t exist in your mother tongue or that are very similar but not identical.
Be self-aware of your mother tongue to avoid interferences, but let it help you when possible.
Skip fill-in-the-blank drills.

Now that you are learning a language through practice and study, you need to preserve what you learn. Make it stick. The next chapter is about the most famous technique to do just that...

Joke about the tower of babel, comic strip fropm XKCD

Image from XKCD, by Randall Munroe. CC BY-NC 2.5