>>119096Start it sooner rather than later, don't put it off by trying to come up with a special plan for how to learn it perfectly. If I really buckled down and got into french ~2-4 years ago, like I said I wanted to, I probably would be at A2 already.
Use singing while reading the song lyrics to start learning. If you want you can start with finding Disney songs in the target language.
Feel free to use "advice for target language, in target language" YouTube videos. These are quite good even at a very low skill level.
If you're on Firefox and learning Chinese/Japanese use 10ten Japanese reader (you can even put this on your phone) or zhongwen ("the popular Chinese learning tool"). Don't worry, I avoided 10ten out of pride/ego for a long time but it really doesn't hinder, so long as your practicing via singing to written lyrics it only helps and doesn't hurt.
Some Pronunciation TipsRead the "<language> phonology" page on Wikipedia to learn how to pronounce it well. Don't worship the "closest English approximations" only use these as a jumping off point, compare the "target sound" for example Chinese "p" to your approximate sound, for example English "p" (use the English phonology Wikipedia page and the <target language> phonology wiki page).
Sometimes articles/books give closest approximation sounds which are… just wrong. Ignore idiots who try and claim the "e" sound in languages like Japanese/Spanish are pronounced like… "ay". It's not.
Also if you're doing pinyin (mandarin Chinese) I came up with a … mnemonic sort of thing to remember how to learn all the "sh/ch/j" sounds. The ones with the tongue up the back similar to Japanese sh sounds, (it's more "kawaii") all use single letter consonant symbols, q, j and x. The ones with the tongue lower down and less kawaii all have 2 consonant symbols, (the second of which is an h), so sh, zh and ch.
