For languages that have a phonetic alphabet (like georgian, armenian, russian, japanese hiragana and katakana, korean), I found the easiest way is to spend one

For languages that have a phonetic alphabet (like georgian, armenian, russian, japanese hiragana and katakana, korean), I found the easiest way is to spend one hour a day practicing for 1 or 2 months and then never ever use an alternative transcription when you could use the native phonetic alphabet (or it will take you that much longuer to really master it). First start by some simple study of each letters pronunciation and use them in simple words and use flash cards to remember. Once you master that I recommend doing some dictation exercise, just listen to a dialogue in the target language and start writing it, it's a great way to improve your speed and fluency in the new alphabet... And fluency in an alphabet is very important to help you with memorization of new word (once you get past the decoding phase, I find it's much quicker to learn new words written in the alphabet) For ideograph (like japanese kanji, chinese hanzi and korean hanja), I find that finding a book that teach you the ethymology of the character helps a lot in learning by giving you context on why the character is used that way and it's also very helpful to help master the differences between same characters used in japanese and in chinese. A good website to read on learning languages (despite the rather cheesy title) is http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html The forum discussion is rather interesting... Good luck, and try to visit the country, it's still the quickest way to learn the language