Long ago, the Army gifted me with 6 months of classroom instruction in French, which got me pretty far along the road to fluency. A few years later, I took a refresher course that covered surprising new material.
I spent two weeks drilling on simple phonetics and sentence cadence & emphasis. These three things had not been part of my original instruction and are key to a minimal foreign accent.
What I did was buy elementry grade books for children to start off with and watch cartoons. Then i started listening to the news with subtitles. Yes I also used babel.
Then I watched soap operas. I was interested in Spanish. I shopped the local Mercado and carnecerias in town and ordered in Spanish. The people were happy to help me with fine tuning my pronunciation.
What I noticed was that the verbs were the most difficult to master. Once you learn the fundamentals then I noticed similarities with other languages, so then I did the same with my French and Castilian Spanish.
I made a point of learning my vegetables, fruits, road signs, and important medical terms.
Then I studied slang and make sure you understand inflection so as to not piss off someone unintentionally.
carnicerías. And Castilian Spanish is a dialect, not a language.
Oh yeah. I learned to count to a million and tell time, read a bus schedule and count money. Make sure you master that!
I’ve been using duolingo but if I hadn’t already taken a year of spanish back in high school giving me familiarity with basic grammar I’d be pretty lost. It really doesn’t teach you very much about grammar. I could see it being a useful tool to learn and reinforce vocabulary, but I would never want to learn a language from scratch using it. Once I get to a more advanced stage I may have trouble with it - right now it’s acting as kind of a refresher for stuff I learned, but a long time ago, so it’s useful that way.
Might try telenovellas. The plots are so basic and the acting is so overdone that it seems like it may be suitable for learning, getting the gist of what you’re watching. Seems like they’d be painful to watch otherwise though.
Might try babbel. Anyone have any opinions of that?
Babel is the same as every other app: at first you may learn a few words or expressions you hadn’t previously encountered, but it’s quite repetitive and not really a language-learning tool but a language-exam-passing tool. Assuming your teacher happens to like the same vocabulary as whomever wrote the app, that is.
That happens quite frequently in Japan where (typically) Western men will get Japanese girlfriends or other Asian women will get Japanese boyfriends.
The problem is that in Japanese, “men talk” is very different from “women talk.”
For example, a man will usually say “boku” or “ore” for “I” while a woman will say “watashi” or “atashi”.
Learning Japanese from your lover leads to feminine sounding men or macho sounding women.
In Thailand, women sometimes use the male pronoun or terminal when speaking to a very young male child or a male Farang, presumably to help them learn the correct pronoun.
Unrelated to pronouns, there are big differences between male diction and lexicon and female diction and lexicon. I’m afraid some female-taught males may end up finding female speech much easier to understand than male speech.
Pimsleur has been good for basics. I normally memorize the first 10 lessons before I travel. you need to actually respond to prompts out loud, which leads to being able to respond in person pretty automatically.
I had good luck learning English mainly from watching sitcoms and other light entertainment. It’s simple, fun and keeps giving you rewards for progression. Today, you can do better by searching for Youtube videos you find entertaining or interesting.
Remember how you can spend a lot of time, thought and effort playing Kerbal Space Program and learn a lot without it feeling like a burden, even to the point of getting into a flow state? If you can find something that makes you feel like that, you’ll be learning at a surprisingly fast pace once you get your bearings. Just accept that you’ll be lost in the wilderness for a while at first. In your case, that period should be a few months since you already have the basics. I wouldn’t fret grammar and formal rules at first; That’s now how humans evolved language nor how young children learn it.
I would ask myself the question: “Would I enjoy doing this in my first language?” If so, that’s promising. if not, it can easily feel like homework you don’t actually have to hand in.
What’s the difference in meaning between boku/ore and watashi/atashi aside from gender associations?
When i worked in NYC, my immigrant friends who spoke English most fluently watched sit coms. They said it was good for learning slang and how people would actually talk to each other. And back then, sit coms had laugh tracks, so the dialogue was slow.
I’d say the best method is a combination is everything, language programs, videos and self interaction, because each are limited in producing practical real world results. Language programs don’t fully correct incorrect pronunciations, videos are situational depending on the genre and interaction with native speakers may lead to non-standard accents/phrases/slang.
There’s also formal and informal speech. This is especially true for Asian languages (e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Korean) that have different words/phrases depending on the seniority (in status or age) of the person(s) you’re speaking to.
That said, I know of several Korean celebrities who speak English very well because they watch a lot of English language videos. One in particular, Kang So Ra, said she learned English at a young age because her mother only bought the cheaper English versions of Disney movies.
Another advantage of learning from watching videos is that you pick up on the tone, and facial and body expressions of the people on the video. While I can’t fully understand what native speakers are saying in Japanese, Chinese or Korean, I can pick up on the gist of it because I’ve been watching videos in those languages for decades.
One thing you can sometimes get from TV shows/movies is dialectal/personal pronunciation variations. Half the cast of Daredevil/Defenders stresses each of the syllables in “Murdock”: that he never corrects it is weird, but that it will happen is pretty common. For a couple of Spanish examples, La Casa de Papel does have people who, while mostly having Spanish-from-Spain accents and not having strong regional ones, do have different accents. Other shows prefer to give everybody language-tape accents: hearing those in Las Chicas del Cable was one of the things which made it impossible for me to stand that series, but it can make it easier to understand for a foreign learner.
From firsthand expenence I can say do typical training methods to get at survival mode, then TOTAL immersion. As in, go to the place with the language, and do NOT hang out with English speakers.
That, for me, was immensely effective, but can be scary and is on the expensive side. It’s not for everyone.
Oh, I don’t know, I get paid for it 
Seriously, there are stuff such as cultural exchanges, voluntary work… which can provide relatively cheap ways to be in an inmersive situation, and also doing stuff you don’t normally do in your daily life. It requires being the kind of person who’s comfortable stepping out of their daily ruts, but it can be really, really good.
boku is softer, ore is much rougher. Males will often use ore when talking among themselves, and in more polite segments of society then they would never use ore when talking to women.
atashi and watashi don’t seem to have as extreme difference. atashi tends to be used more among friends. Or so it seems. I’m male so I paid more attention to the male pronouns.
So, it would be a bit like this?:
Boku = I would like a glass of water.
Ore = I would like a glass of water.
If a man used “ore” when talking to a woman, what impression(s) might it give?
My Japanese may be rusty, but why would you use any pronoun at all when asking for a drink of water?
I think the story with “ore” is that it is considered rude in extremely formal situations, and that (in modern Japanese, anyway) it is casually used by men (especially among friends/family, in contrast to formal situations) but not so by women. It’s not a bad word or anything.
Sure, but someone who hasn’t studied Japanese wouldn’t know that.
[/quite]I think the story with “ore” is that it is considered rude in extremely formal situations, and that (in modern Japanese, anyway) it is casually used by men (especially among friends/family, in contrast to formal situations) but not so by women. It’s not a bad word or anything.
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I’ll disagree with the qualifier “extremely” as “ore” would be inappropriate in most formal or even “polite” situations. The impression I have of “extremely formal” would be something like a black tie dinner.
It’s not used in normal business environments, talking to strangers, neighbors who aren’t close friends, doctors, etc.
There isn’t a direct comparison to English, so it’s hard to describe.
Blue collar workers tend to use it more than professionals. Many men never use it, even with other men. I never heard my ex-wife’s father ever use it, despite living with them for a year.
I’d agree that it’s not really offensive like “fuck” is, but still not appropriate.
Depends on the woman. Most women I knew would be turned off. Some women wouldn’t care and one in many tens of thousands would use it herself.