> I remember my German teacher at school recounting how she learnt it from scratch at university - they were started off by having to learn lots of texts by rot

> I remember my German teacher at school recounting how she learnt it from scratch at university - they were started off by having to learn lots of texts by rote. Seemed a bit retrograde but it worked and they learned rapidly. This is actually the best way to learn. It's obviously not for everyone. The basic premise is that you will internalize correct grammar and phrasing, assuming that the texts are representative of the accepted way (or at least, at a point in time - when they were written). Once you know those by rote, speaking can be next by playing "mad libs" with sentences and paragraphs in real-time.