There's nothing that you need to DO

You want another language. Okay. But then immediately you think to yourself, "In that case, what do I need to do?"

Right away, you are heading off-track.

Obviously you need to do something. I don't deny that. But it's more along the lines of allowing something to be done to you. It's arranging the condition and setting up systems and habits, after which you allow the process to happen to you.

You're not to put words into your head. You are not the one who must learn rules and apply them. You are not the one who must push through the nervousness barrier and force yourself to speak. 

No, no no . . . None of that!

You're not the doer, you're the do-ee.

You're not responsible for the results, either. And that's good to realize, because this removes any pressure of possible failure. 

You're not to measure your achievements either. You aren't achieving in the sense that you've been trained to expect. It won't go neatly and tidily. 

You'll get better imperfectly, messily, sloppily, randomly, magically, and unfathomably. You'll learn the language without knowing how you did it! 

Don't put pressure on yourself to remember vocabulary, to spell correctly, to pronounce correctly, to understand the rule, to comprehend, to treat language learning as a serious business, or to study in any way.

Put yourself in the right environment, and get your brain into the right state. That's all that's required of you. The rest will happen automatically.

Don't consciously try to learn a language. You can't. No one can. The most that you'll achieve is to learn a few things about it.

Internal grammar and spelling

Internalize the grammar and the spelling too.

It’s a fallacy to believe that you can learn a language by studying its grammar. And to a great extent the same applies to spelling, despite the fact that schools try to teach you with spelling lists and spelling rules.

The truth of the matter is that you mostly just develop a sense what looks and feels ‘right’. This happens when you see the same forms again and again. You get used to seeing words spelled in a certain way, and words arranged in certain orders. (People who read and grade papers with a lot of mistakes find that they begin to lose that sense!)

The thing then is to get a lot of exposure to the language that you want to learn. Automatically you pick up grammar and spelling along the way. There may be a few gaps left over, but you may learn them as exceptions. It’s not the rule to learn the bulk in this way.

Even if you could learn all of the rules—quite impossible, as no one has ever managed it!—it wouldn’t do you any good, as you wouldn’t be able to retrieve and apply them rapidly enough for even ordinary conversation and texting.