4 years ago I would speak only Portuguese. Now I can speak Portuguese, English and French. I know there's a lot of people who says "I learned this in 3 months". I probably learned the same thing in 3 months. When I say that I can speak 3 languages is that I can talk about any subject using those 3 languages... and I am not someone who studies those languages everyday.
I don't go to meet ups to learn languages, I don't take classes (I did for 3 months to learn the basics of French), I don't like spending time on youtube learning the languages everyday.
If you are like me, but you really want to learn a new language, I will try to give you some tips that worked for me:
- Learn the basics
Go to youtube just to learn the basics. e.g: numbers, greetings, common questions, family members, pronouns. After learning that, you will know how to formulate basic phrases. - Duolingo
This one is just to improve your vocabulary. You will end up memorizing phrase structures and new words. - Watch Cartoon
This one is very important. When we are kids we are always watching cartoons and that's how we learn a lot of different words. The vocabulary used in cartoons are really simple and, because you already watched the same cartoon before in your language, you will improve your listening and will start to focus on the context of dialogs instead of focusing in each word. (In my case I re-watched Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z in french and in english. Worth it! \o/) - Go out (to places where you can learn that language while having fun)
Because I am living in Montreal, it was easy to go to a place where I could improve my skills in French and English. However, the important thing here is to have fun. I went out to some bars and karaokes and had a few beers, started hitting on some girls, started talking to people there and, in the end, I learned a lot from that. That's how every learning process should work... having fun.
I hope those tips will help you. It helped me a lot and now I'm learning Spanish using the same process =)
Just remember.. every time that you're learning something new, the beginning of the process you will be memorizing it. Don't fight agains associating that with rules that you have in other language or something else. you will need to memorize it. When you reach the "watching cartoon" step of learning, it will start to become natural.
I hope I can help someone here and if you found it useful, please resteem it. Maybe you have someone following you who'd like to see that too.
Good luck learning new languages!