How to most effectively study a language on your own?

[Raholeun]

Several times now have I taken up Georgian. I failed to master the script, which I find especially difficult to write and it makes me feel dyslectic when reading. The variation between the letters just seems too limited. And even when you get past the alphabet, the learning curve is steep: the phonotactics, seven cases, the verb paradigm.. With familial obligations as well as some cyber security diploma's I have committed to, unfortunately there's very little time left for learning new languages, let alone challenging ones like Georgian..

Still, I really love it and it would be wonderful to advance my knowledge a bit. A good number two that is a bit less daunting is Urdu.

[Vijay]

Do you think there's much to say about language learning besides piling up the hours of learning?

I think it's about more than just time. Some approaches have yielded better results than others in a smaller amount of time. I also think it's less about time than about just gathering data, honestly.

Like, the main problem with the "grammar-translation" method commonly used for Latin seems to be that the method exposes students to the language too little, namely the reading passages and translation exercises are too few.

I thought people were just fucking sick and tired of doing tedious translation exercises all damn day, especially against their will (this seems to have been the case for most of the history of European education). Also, just translating stuff and learning grammar divorces language from its cultural context.

For other languages, it gets very catch-as-catch-can. I recently saw some comments from a native Javanese speaker so I asked them a few questions. Almost a month later, I’ve given up waiting for a response.

Speaking of, I actually have a Javanese friend if you want me to pass on the same questions? I'm sure he wouldn't mind (actually he's been starving to use Javanese; he's in the US atm).

Thanks! Now I just have to remember what they were.

(I think it was related to my discovery that mereka is a Javanese loan into Indonesian.)

Do you mean this?

Also, Kuchigakatai's post reminded me: does anyone know of anything like LLPSI for Sanskrit?

LLPSI is ultimately just a glorified* graded reader. Aren't there graded readers, or just readers, for Sanskrit? There should be...

* due to being monolingual in spite of being in a non-modern language. lol, I'm now just imagining an Old French reader completely in Old French...

There are many readers (I have one), but all that I've found start out at a much higher level than LLPSI.

There's always Learn Sanskrit in 30 Days from the National Integration Language Series.