Free How to Become Smarter by Charles Spender

you do not need to attend any special classes or buy high-priced crash courses. You can learn a foreign language independently and cheaply, and the independent approach is, in my view, the most effective one. Although they taught me English at all educational institutions that I had attended since age 10, by age 19, my English vocabulary was no greater than 10 or 20 words. When I decided that I was going to study English in earnest, I learned more by myself within the first 3 months than I did in the previous 9 years. The basic outline of the recommended approach is as follows (I adapted it to the modern technological advances).
    First, you have to learn the basic grammar and basic vocabulary by reading some cheap and small introductory textbook. There is no way around this first step and there are no shortcuts here. Taking classes is a much slower and less effective approach. After this first step, you can either read a more advanced textbook or you may get right down to business and start reading real (unadapted) texts. Just like the textbook approach, the latter approach will introduce you to the more advanced grammar and vocabulary, but it is more fun. In my view, the most serious obstacle to mastering the foreign language is not the grammar, but vocabulary. Therefore, much of your progress will depend on whether you can expand your vocabulary quickly in some fun and easy way. Reading foreign texts the hard way, by going from the text to a dictionary and back four to five times within each sentence is neither fun nor easy.
    What you can do instead is find some articles on the Internet that you find interesting, such as news stories or a biography of your favorite musician, and translate them using Bing translator ( www.microsofttranslator.com ) or another free translator in the following way. Copy one or two sentences, paste them into the Bing translator and translate them into your native language. Now read the translation and then the original sentence(s) and make sure you grasp the meaning of each word in the foreign text. The automatic translators are not very good today, despite all the advances in information technology, and the translation they produce is often awkward and funny. Nonetheless, they can facilitate learning the frequently used vocabulary, which is about 5 to 10 thousand words. The inability to learn these first 5-10 thousand words is the glass ceiling that prevents most people from mastering a foreign language. If you can overcome this barrier, further learning of the language will be a breeze. Going back to our foreign language text, if you suspect that the Microsoft software translated some words incorrectly, you can use a paper or internet dictionary to find the correct meaning. Continue copying, pasting, and perusing each sentence until you finish the whole article. You can reread the foreign language copy one more time, reading all sentences in one sitting, to make sure you memorized all the new words. You can also start working on another article in a similar fashion. If you find unadapted texts too difficult and confusing at this point, you can read an advanced language textbook and then try the automatic translation step again. During this initial vocabulary-building step, you need to use a dictionary that provides definitions in your native language.
    The advantage of the above method is that you have to make a trip to the dictionary only once per sentence on average. This is better than the 4-5 trips per sentence with the usual paper-based approach. If you are dying to read some foreign text that you have as a hard copy only, you can use optical character recognition (OCR) software and a scanner to digitize the text. After that, you can use the above technique to translate and read it. If you can afford to spend several hours a day on this vocabulary-building method, then you should be able to learn the frequently used vocabulary within 3-6 months. If you can read real-life texts without the