Get the guide
The guide on this website offers you the first few chapters of Teach Yourself a Foreign Language. These chapters provide the essential tools to get you started, but the full guide has even more chapters to help you become a confident and effective language learner.
If you want to access these chapters, you’ll need to download the full guide.
What’s in the guide
In the full version, you’ll unlock valuable insights and strategies, including:
- How to use input effectively
- How to improve the speed at which you learn grammar and vocabulary
- The most effective flashcard techniques and how to create your own
- Practical tips for improving pronunciation and becoming a confident speaker
- Guidance on what to focus on once you reach the intermediate stage
- How to choose activities that will speed up your progress
- How people learn to speak lots of languages and how you can do it too
- And more
Where to get it
The full guide is available right now as a pay-what-you-want download. If you’d like to support my work, any donation is greatly appreciated. The suggested price is $7.99.
Not able to pay? Not sure it’s worth it for you? No problem. Language learning should be accessible to everyone, so feel free to select a price of $0—no credit card needed.
The book is available on Amazon for $7.99 here, and you can pay what you want on Leanpub. Select the amount you want to pay, then press add ebook to cart. No sign-up necessary.
Questions & answers
Why not just put all the chapters on your website?
I used to put it here, however I am constantly making improvements, and maintaining continuity between the website and the ebook was taking a lot of my time. I still want the most important info to be easily accessible and for people to come across it online, so I’m keeping first few sections here, but the overall task is now a lot less of a burden.
Why use Leanpub?
I put it on Amazon to reach a wider audience, however I don’t have the option to make it free. Leanpub lets me offer the book for free, so I keep it there.
Can I share the book?
Yes, I’m happy for you to share it with any individuals in your life you think might want it.
How long has this taken you?
Many hundreds of hours. Though you might only see a few words on a page, every chapter has required a lot of thought about how I can best structure it to be maximally useful. Basically every section has gone through extensive rewrites, and is the result of many hours of research. It’s relatively easy to write down everything you know on a topic. Making it concise, researched, and easy to understand is the hard part. There’s always improvements to be made, I’m not 100% there yet, which is part of why I’m still releasing regular revisions years after it was first released.
I’d like to make a suggestion/reach out
I receive emails from people only very rarely, and feedback is even more rare, so I’d love to hear from you no matter what you’ve got to say. Please use the contact form here.
Why is $7.99 the suggested price?
That number comes from Leanpub, anything below that price uses a different royalty structure, so a smaller percentage goes to me. If you want to give less, I’d suggest using the donation feature in Buy me a Coffee and downloading it from there.
Why did you make the guide?
I initially made this guide out of a desire to help people in the language learning community on Reddit. The idea started when I saw people were constantly asking how to learn languages, and our poor users were having to constantly repeat themselves. I decided it would be a good topic for the FAQ we have there, and began writing up some key steps based on what I’d learned over the past few years running that community. As I kept adding info, it quickly grew to be the largest article in the FAQ. At that point, I moved it to its own page so it wouldn’t crowd out the other articles. It eventually outgrew even the wiki functionality on Reddit, so I then made it into a PDF ebook to take advantage of the enhanced formatting and other features a PDF file gives you. I eventually started my own website and made it available here, hoping to reach a wider audience.
It’s always been a labour of love, and the occasional messages of thanks and donations are immensely gratifying. But even without that, I would probably still be here. At the end of the day, knowing I’m helping make my hobby more accessible to the world is enough.