Learning a new language - Part II

... continued from here

3. Learn the basic grammar rules for tenses and genders (genders are more important in some languages than others).
In Croatian language, if you where to say a blue man or a blue woman, the word blue would look different (plavi muskarac vs. plava zena). This is why it is important to understand genders or you may use a wrong adverbs to describe yourself. If you like to be a source of entairtainment for the locals, then go right ahead and forget about using the right gender. :-)

As for learning proper tenses, I would encourage learning the present tense immediately. If you feel brave, learn the past tense (as you will talk a lot about the past) and then future (as you talk less about the future). Other fancy tenses can be left for when you feel comfortable with the past, present and future tenses.

4. Learn the 'connector' words.

What I mean by 'connector' words are all those words that are left in a sentence once you remove all the verbs, nouns and adjectives. These words are the glue of language.

I remember, when I was learning French, one summer long, long time ago, our teacher gave us several pages of 'connector' words (in, like, as, with, of, at, ...) in French. Try learning these basic words and then take a look at an article in that foreign language. You will be surprised to see how much of the flow you understand with even little understanding of the main words.

... to be continued.