The number one language tool for me these days is parallel texts. I grab ebooks in my target language, along with their english translations, and I use some open-source software called "hunalign" to create a sentence-aligned text.
Hunalign is an amazing little piece of software that will figure out which sentences correspond to which other ones in the second text, independent of language. It uses some neat algorithms to find the correspondences using sentence length, and then builds a partial dictionary and rematches.
At the end, I get a two-column version of the book, with one language on each side, with sentences matching in each row. As I read in my target language, I can just glance over to the equivalent English on the other side in order to get the meaning.
Reading is the fastest way I've found to really get an intuitive sense for the language's grammar and to learn tons of words. And the whole process goes much faster with parallel texts. I learned fluent German through reading, and now I'm working my way through Dutch. I started Dutch in January, and used parallel texts to read through the Harry Potter series while listening to the Dutch audiobook versions of them...now I feel quite ready to jump into non-parallel Dutch novels.
Hunalign is an amazing little piece of software that will figure out which sentences correspond to which other ones in the second text, independent of language. It uses some neat algorithms to find the correspondences using sentence length, and then builds a partial dictionary and rematches.
At the end, I get a two-column version of the book, with one language on each side, with sentences matching in each row. As I read in my target language, I can just glance over to the equivalent English on the other side in order to get the meaning.
Reading is the fastest way I've found to really get an intuitive sense for the language's grammar and to learn tons of words. And the whole process goes much faster with parallel texts. I learned fluent German through reading, and now I'm working my way through Dutch. I started Dutch in January, and used parallel texts to read through the Harry Potter series while listening to the Dutch audiobook versions of them...now I feel quite ready to jump into non-parallel Dutch novels.
More info available on my parallel text process coming soon on my blog: http://languagefixation.wordpress.com/