Perl is the programming language that's closest to a natural language that I've seen. It's very aggravating knowing that there are 20+ ways to say the exact sa

Perl is the programming language that's closest to a natural language that I've seen. It's very aggravating knowing that there are 20+ ways to say the exact same thing, and in order to understand most people you need to learn all 20+ ways and completely memorize them. Along with immersion, which is crucial, I've found it's useful to color-code as much textual information as you can, and aim for a "lossy" understanding of the language. Read a passage or listen to someone and just try to get some vague meaning from it, don't get caught up on particular words or grammar. Also, if you are just starting, I find the traditional method of flinging a few phrases and a bunch of completely random vocabulary is inane. Learn those phrases, sure, but try to learn pronouns and modal verbs as soon as possible, followed by the most common form of past tense. Pulling figures out of thin air, I'd say 90% of the time people talk about what they need, want, should do, or can do, or about things that have already occurred. Some languages are handy in that you get a free "immediate future" tense by learning the present tense; if you ask a question like 'Are you eating?' it's understood as 'Are you about to eat?' in the right context. Once you have this framework of expressing most of your thoughts, you can start to dump in all the vocabulary and extra grammar. Eventually, after learning all the grammar and other random bits of knowledge, the learning game plateaus and you are basically just learning vocabulary, idioms, and slang.