Learning a language (or any skill) will always take a lot of personal work and commitment. But this is a problem where we need better tools and solutions, even

Learning a language (or any skill) will always take a lot of personal work and commitment. But this is a problem where we need better tools and solutions, even as our tools and solutions have been improving rapidly. More people trying to innovate in this space will only improve them further. Look, 100 years ago we only had dry books with conjugation tables for mostly classical and European languages. Most of the world's languages were barely described, we barely had adequate tools to describe them, and most policy was bent on eradicating them. Move forward to the mid-20th century, and we learning tools like the FSI courses and Pimsleur courses, which are at least getting decent audio out there. Then the Internet occurred, which has completely transformed our ability to access authentic spoken and written material in major target languages. Online dictionaries and apps are better than ever. You can look up a page in Wikipedia and see the target language version, which reveals so much more than a dictionary can. Machine translation helps you see how words are strung together. Now we have Duolingo and things like Anki and Tofugu.com, which of course do not take you all the way, but are still a huge improvement over the tools we had before. Even better is coming.