Lone Gunman

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

In learning languages 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
   • FSI Language Courses should be your first port-of-call. Produced by the United States’ Foreign Service Institute to train ambassadors, diplomats and ‘other’ agents, the FSI courses are in the public domain and are of a high quality.
   • Wikiversity’s Centre for Foreign Language Learning provides great material for popular languages.
   • Wikibooks’ Language Bookshelf also has a wide selection of learning material for the popular languages.
   • Go to university - Not literally, but instead search the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s available courses. This is material provided free from universities the world over - e.g. MIT’s foreign language selection.
5. Hit the books - Start learning using all the material you acquired in the previous step.
6. Speak to people and read books - it’s the best way to practice and it’s free.