It takes A LOT of conscious effort to learn any foreign language to fluency. I used a combination of all of the methods mentioned in this article to learn Spanish for two years straight and I did become fluent. I’ve written a book about the methods that I used which I plan to publish sometime soon. Like you after spending years in language classes and thousands of dollars on commercial methods, what ultimately worked for me was a custom designed DIY method. I’m using a similar method to learn Mandarin now.

I like your analysis of the different methods. I think the reason why many people don’t achieve fluency as adults is because as you said people want to be native speaker fluent without going through the baby babble phase and looking stupid. Most young kids don’t have the social awareness to feel ashamed for messing up words and using improper grammar which is why they can progress faster. We have to be willing to fail and potentially look foolish to learn a language. I internalized that lesson when I was learning Spanish and now I’m picking up Mandarin much faster because of it. I have plenty more to say on this topic but I’ll reserve my comments for your next article.

Thanks for the great read!