Latin was prob­a­bly the sin­gle most use­ful sub­ject I was taught in school. I despised it at the time, but now I have come to realise its impor­tance and many applications–the great­est of which is how it has helped me learn other languages.

In learn­ing lan­guages (although none to flu­ency… yet) I have found the fol­low­ing resources invalu­able. This is the order in which I would sug­gest researching/learning:

  1. Choose a lan­guage to learn — How to Learn Any Lan­guage pro­vides good lan­guage overviews and gives infor­ma­tion on dif­fi­culty, pop­u­lar­ity, and other met­rics. How­ever, don’t be put off by stats!
  2. Decon­struct your desired lan­guage — Tim Fer­riss pro­vides a good overview of how to quickly decon­struct a lan­guage — an impor­tant step that will give you a great insight into the work­ings of a language.
  3. Under­stand the decon­struc­tion — Yes, you may have decon­structed it, but do you really know what it all means? Study the lin­guis­tic typol­ogy of your cho­sen lan­guage to really under­stand it.
  4. Find high-quality free mate­r­ial
  5. Hit the books — Start learn­ing using all the mate­r­ial you acquired in the pre­vi­ous step. There’s a spe­cific order in which you should do this:
    1. Pro­nun­ci­a­tion: From the very begin­ning you need to know how to pro­nounce words cor­rectly. Find some native speak­ers or learn the IPA and do it phonetically.
    2. Vocab­u­lary: Learn­ing gram­mar becomes much eas­ier with spaced rep­e­ti­tion. Don’t trans­late from your native lan­guage: use a com­bi­na­tion of images and tar­get words (trans­la­tion will limit your use of the words). Choose your words wisely: word lists that are tai­lored to your sit­u­a­tion are always good.
    3. Gram­mar: Again, spaced rep­e­ti­tion and good mate­r­ial is the way to go.
    4. The Rest: Read­ing and writ­ing, speak­ing and lis­ten­ing… now that you have a grasp of the lan­guage (how­ever small), it’s time to immerse yourself.