The idea of 'hacking language learning' puts me in mind of Kato Lomb [1] a hungarian linguist who worked for the UN as one of the world's first simultaneous translators and knew around a dozen languages fluently. One of the most interesting things about her is that she didn't take any interest in languages before her adult life had begun; before that she was a physicist.
In one of her books she advocates reading foreign language texts without using a dictionary at all, just trying to figure out the meaning from what little you already know (of course you have to be at a certain level to even try this, although you'd be surprised how little you need to know to start.)
This process forces you to think logically about who words are constructed, and to use your own current knowledge to e figure out meanings of words. For example, you might already know a small part of a compound word in german, and use this along with the context of the sentence to figure out the meaning of the whole word.
Comments
The idea of 'hacking language learning' puts me in mind of Kato Lomb [1] a hungarian linguist who worked for the UN as one of the world's first simultaneous translators and knew around a dozen languages fluently. One of the most interesting things about her is that she didn't take any interest in languages before her adult life had begun; before that she was a physicist.
In one of her books she advocates reading foreign language texts without using a dictionary at all, just trying to figure out the meaning from what little you already know (of course you have to be at a certain level to even try this, although you'd be surprised how little you need to know to start.)
This process forces you to think logically about who words are constructed, and to use your own current knowledge to e figure out meanings of words. For example, you might already know a small part of a compound word in german, and use this along with the context of the sentence to figure out the meaning of the whole word.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb