My friend is looking for a resource to become fluent in French, he is forced to work with it. Asked to find a certain book, but it is not yet pirated on the resources of the wiki. My guess is that pirates have better alternatives for such a thing, so I'm launching a discussion.

I only ever heard about the book "Minna no Nihongo" in the context of learning Japanese.

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[–] cacti@ani.social 5 points 1 day ago

Immersion. Books or apps won't teach them anything.

Here are some resources:
Input hypothesis
Tatsumoto's Guide to Learning Japanese (or any other language for that matter, just skip the kanji specific parts, and I wouldn't recommend joining their community)
Antimoon's Learner Reports

I had already written at length about the topic, but the OP I had replied to seems to have deleted their post so I'm just going to do it again.

My native language is Turkish. I reached basic English fluency when I was ~14 years old and I'm currently doing Japanese immersion with my comprehension rate of the Japanese content I consume being around 90% (mostly video game content and anime). I achieved this primarily by consuming interesting content in my target language. I didn't go to any language classes at all in both cases, and school itself likely only made my English skills worse.

This technique essentially aims to replicate how people acquire their first language when they're babies, which essentially means lots of comprehensible input and no output initially. Input comes first, output comes a few thousands of hours later, similar to how it takes 4 years for a human baby to have acquired the language just enough to be able to start speaking. How language acquisition itself works can be explained like this.

Though in the case of adults this can take much less time with the help of flashcards, dictionaries, and reading (you should not start reading from the get-go though). And getting that much input is thankfully much easier in our age because of the Internet, and essentially all you need to do is watch interesting, comprehensible (visual cues help a lot) content in your target language. You should aim for 10,000 hours of comprehensible input for basic fluency, which would take around 4 years at 7 hours per day, or more unrealistically 1.5 years at 18 hours per day.

I haven't yet come across any guide other than Tatsumoto's that promotes using only libre tooling for language acquisition, so that's why I primarily recommend his website.