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Rational_Brony comments on Learn A New Language! - Less Wrong
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Deep immersion courses are freaking awesome. It's almost like sink-or-swim, but you've got handlebars and floaters and lifeguards. The big trap is to start speaking English with everyone rather than whatever language you're learning, but that's inevitable at lower levels. Also, you meet lots of awesome people: you see, it takes a special kind of folk to go spend a prolonged period of time by themselves in a foreign country learning a foreign language. They tend to display a fairly large subset of the rationalist virtues.
I have seen courses using so-called direct method, where speaking any language except the one you learn is strictly forbidden. (It helps if the participants come from different countries.)
How is it even possible to start? Pictures. A lot of pictures. It is important to have a huge database of unambiguous pictures. Sometimes you use body movements to ilustrate a concept (just like people do naturally when they don't know the word). Gradually it becomes possible to have a trivial conversation. Also the lessons take a few hours, to repeat and repeat the given amount of material again and again.
I have seen this method used for teaching Esperanto, and one week (4-5 hours a day) was enough to make one able to speak simply about everyday topics. (Here is the textbook, but I suppose it would not have the same effect without the real teacher and classmates.)
This is basically what Rosetta Stone does. It can be pretty effective, even without social reinforcement.