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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[–] Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Well, everything depends on balance and what is easy for him. If he likes reading more than watching/listening, then maybe a textbook is the way to go, or vice versa. Sorry that I can't provide specific language tips, I'm a Japanese learner 😅

General Tips:

Decide if a textbook is right for you. Check online reviews and YT videos of people going through/teaching based on that textbook. If you like it, get it. For me, I value textbooks solely for teaching grammar, structured learning, and giving me a few prompts to follow. I feel it's hard to just learn grammar from reading in my case, as a lot of rules I would've flew over my head or been hard for me to comprehend on my own without isolating is first. Beginners might not even know how to ask a question about a grammar point.
YT is your friend (unfortunately) to find all kinds of videos, both for learning and for immersion
Immersion might take a bit to reach, but you can start with simple children's books. Some countries might have free to read online books if the copyright has expired on it. Play games, watch TV, listen to songs, literally do anything involving the target lang. As I said though, people preach immersion from day one, but it might be hard. I like to think of textbooks, YT tutorials, and learning material as the crutches that help to prepare you for immersion. If you start reading kids books and wanna pull your hair out cause you can't understand everything, then pick up some learning material. There might be a website specific to your language for graded material based on difficulty.
Find a local or online community to practice and learn with. Could be a forum board and weekly discord calls like I do. Libraries and local classes probably exist too. There's one I was too shy to use that encourages in-person meetups in your city.
No single resource is gonna solve your problems. If an app or textbook or YT channel claims they alone can get you fluent, and worse, in a few months, run away. It's a marathon (at least fluency anyway), so don't worry if you're not doing the most optimized learning routine. All languages take a certain amount of time, and you can only slow yourself down, not make a new record. But don't spend all week fretting if you picked the best method or not, cause you'll fall into the pit of "learning about learning" instead of "learning a language."

Specific Tools:

Yomitan: Browser extension that lets you do dictionary lookups on a word on any page you're reading. Supports several languages, just download dictionaries for your language (these can be found without needing to pirate, at least in my case)
Anki: I keep gushing over it lol. Free flashcard tool that uses SRS to help you memorize better. I use it to make flashcards of frequently used words I encounter in the wild.
YouGlish: Various languages, checks YT vids for the word you entered to figure out how natives say it. I also use this to make flashcards sometimes.