Hi Josh, your article is interesting, but I disagree in some points:

1) you do not think grammar is very important. I think the opposite. Grammar is the key of learning language.  Otherwise you don't go too far. Well. if people are happy to only learn "como estas?" "me llamo..", grammar is irrelevant.

2) you undervalued the writing activity. You wrote something like: <em>it is only important if you write a lot in your life.</em> Assuming the majority of people are learning some languages are not illeterate, I guess they do write everyday.

3) of course, languages learning is not only for gifted people, it is a science, like you wrote in somehow. But not everybody is a scientist:). I am fully qualified linguist and teaching methodology expert in several languages. It took me several years in universities. 

4) I think your article is very good for Americans, because the usual approach for your fellows is: getting there, very quick and, oh my god, no grammar please:)

Nonetheless, as I said at the beginning, your article is interesting and useful.

Hasta luego!

Matteo

Good article, very useful pointers.

To expand on your notes, a few things I believe are very important at the early stage of learning a new language, and help you think in the foreign language quickly.:

- Listen a lot.  Even if you don't understand much, listening makes your brain work and the sounds of the new language becomes familiar.  This helps with pronunciation a great deal.  This I believe is the first key to fluency.

- Practice speaking by repeating the words focusing on the sound only, and totally disregarding how the words are written, especially when the new language has sounds that are not similar to your native language.  Actually I believe strongly that reading a conversation from text is counterproductive at the beginning.  For many or probably most languages, the words don't sound as they are written, English is one for sure, I've seen many English speakers struggle with mispronouncing French when trying to learn by reading from text.  Also, reading from text slows down the process a lot, you look at the text to see how it's written, send the signals to your brain to translate the meaning and convert it into how you think it should sound, then send signals to actually say it.

- Practice speaking by repeating the sentence focusing on the pattern, and totally disregard the grammar.  Again, I believe strongly that too much grammar is counterproductive at the beginning, for the same reason as my point above.

Reading, writing, and grammar are all very important, but would be much more useful after this initial stage, and in fact would be absorbed much more quickly.  How long is this initial stage? that of course varies for each individual, some people takes a few weeks or may be five to ten initial lessons while I've seen others going for a year and still have problems.

Again, good article.