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What progress I made in learning a foreign language, for both vocabulary and appropriate usage of the words, was from learning phrases and not individual words one at a time. Or, to learn several words, it's much easier to learn a phrase that uses those words than just the words themselves. And learning the phrases lets you start to think in the new language and not keep going back via 1-1 word to word from your own language to the foreign one.

One way to learn a lot of those phrases is to have a little story with maybe 20 such sentences and then read the story out loud maybe 20 times a day for a few days. Then practice making the sounds correct via use of language lab where hear a recording of a native speaker reading the story and, then, correcting your reading of the story.

Can learn a lot of a foreign language that way, quickly.

So, this approach is radical: Start with reading and speaking and leave writing and grammar until later, say, after have already learned a lot of phrases. Or, in English, how does one learn I am, you are, he is, we are, you are, they are? Sure, not by memorizing such a table but by lots of phrases that are examples of the content of such a table. Then, when have lots of good examples, learn the rules later.

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