User blog comment:Razlem/How do you prefer to learn a language?/@comment-1917865-20100720162324

I suppose it depends which language you're trying to learn. Romance languages are very easy for me in general, it's just recognizing the patterns.

Russian is a bit more difficult because of the case system, but I have a little chart in my head that I use for declensions.

Chinese is difficult not because of the tones, but the huge variances in pronunciation across different regions (this has been my experience anyway). There doesn't seem to be a standard English-Chinese pronunciation. This is when I usually need a teacher, so I don't end up speaking 3 dialects in one sentence.

But full-on immersion in a country without any formal classes is pretty bad. Just being here in the Southern US, almost all immigrants from Central America speak broken English. All they learn is a few words for basic communication, never speaking the language to its fullest. My relatives were the same when they moved here from Germany. They've been here for decades and still haven't mastered English.