I thought of a way to learn most mainstream languages for free (except internet access, probably) and by yourself, although it might help to have someone along. It involves no travel, no memberships, no books, and only a few hassles compared to actually spending money.

 

There are several things that are important to learning a language. Among them are being able to read, write, and speak the language, being able to translate the language into your preferred language, and having a large source from which to learn the language. This system touches on having a translator, a source, and a pronunciation guide. Also, the actual information may change with time.

 

Make sure that you have internet access. You should probably plan to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the days/weeks of doing this since it might get taxing and you probably want to get the most out of this.

Using your preferred search engine (like google) type in translator. When you see the list of results, don't take the first one, eventually try several of them to see which one has the best features and the fullest vocabulary, which you'll find by trial and error most likely. For the next part you may need to know what region uses the language you have chosen. Type in: domain name extensions. One of the pages will tell you the extension of the region you have chosen. You could also do an advanced search and select the language from the drop-down list. Now you are ready to start, or are you? You have the source material, you have the translator, what's missing? You still need to know how to pronounce your words. There are a few ways to do this. You could type in your language of choice and 'pronunciation' into your searchbar, or you can type in your langage of choice and 'dictionary' into the bar.

 

You may not need the translator program, but you will need the source material unless (you or) your roommate is a complete foreigner. Most dictionaries, as you may know, have a few pages describing how to pronounce words based on the little symbols around each letter.

 

NOTE: Do not use a bulk or full page translation until you are familiar with the common words in the language and definitely don't do a 'reverse translation' which is translating your language into the language you want. Depending on the translation program you use, you may not get a reliable grammatical switch-over. Slowly build sentences longer and longer until you are fluent. Many people have learned a language and decided to go overseas only to find that they don't understand the first thing about the grammar of the language.

That's right, this is just an extra outlet for information that I think will be important to me later on. I think the idea of a blog is great, but it doesn't seem adequately accessible. For instance, I haven't stumbled onto any blogs lately.