HN: Quick tips for learning a foreign language quickly?

This will hardly work out. By reading only, you might (re)learn some things but with time, it will fade away again. To quickly learn a language and make it stick, you need to speak it and have real-life situations using it. No wonder that going to a foreign country is the best way to learn its language.

Go to Odesk and hire someone to talk to you for an hour a day.

I try to find a trick that gets me up and speaking to people as quickly as possible.

In Spanish, for example, if you can conjugate poder, you can say pretty much anything. It's a get-out-of-conjugation-free card because it flips the rest of your sentence into the infinitive. "Is it possible to pay?", "Is it possible for us to go to the beach?". You can structure most any sentence this way and avoid having to deal with tense, subject, conjugation, etc.

I'm learning French now, and getting a ton of mileage out of je voudrais. For the same reasons. The infinitive helps a lot too. "It is very important for me to..."

Naturally, you sound a bit foolish speaking this way, but it gets your point across and gets you talking to people. Think of all those eastern Europeans you meet with their crazy sentence structure, word choice, tenses, etc. But you understand what they're saying, right?

That's the way forward, I think. Just get to the point where you're saying things and being understood. Conjugation, tense, grammar, etc. don't necessarily move the needle there, and can thus be skipped and left for the "polishing" stage that comes later.

My all-time best-liked comment here (judged by karma) has advice about this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816

I am a native speaker of English who has learned Chinese well enough to work as an interpreter and translator in that language, and I speak and read other languages.

Memorising lists of words is counter-effective - I am opposed to flashcards, because meaning is always created by the context.

The methods presented by Steve Kaufman seem interesting to me http://www.youtube.com/user/lingosteve I used Lingq for some time and it was good value for money.

But there is really no easy/quick way. 3 years should be enough to learn any language if you're committed. There are bad ways, though. You have to get a decent exposure to the language, and learn every single day, the more the better.

Try to use the langueage you are trying to learn. Talk to yourself - who are you, where are you, what happened 2 days ago, what do you want to achieve, describe your job, your hobby, your famili. Read stuff that you are really interested in. Find someone who could offer you conversations. Describe your life and the world around you, like a little child.

Don't confuse good methods with hard work.

I have studied about 4 foreign languages (about because of varying levels of effort and involvement). I have found that the only real differentiator in terms of retention and progress (as measured by the likelihood that a native speaker would mistake me as such in person or over text) was the quantity of time that I spent speaking to native speakers. This improved not only my spoken abilities but also my reading abilities, although there is no clear reasoning for why the latter occurred.

If at all possible, go to barbers that speak your target language. If you're old enough to drink (or have a good fake) go to bars where your target language is spoken, start listening to news in the target language. Hell, if you're single or have a particularly liberal significant other start dating a guy/girl in your target language. Audio and social exposure can be fantastically productive, as much as reading/writing is good for language acquisition.