Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I learnt French through textbooks and then once I had a good grasp of grammar, reading French children's literature with a dictionary. I don't know if that's the "best" way, but it worked.

Fwiw I mostly learnt English by just reading English books and not having a clue what was going on for a couple years but eventually got it. However I was a young child when I did that, so my ability to learn new languages was much better. I could probably do the same as an adult, but it would take me a lot longer. Don't underestimate the brain's ability to learn even without direct "teaching" like a textbook gives you.

I was studying French too (I really should get back into it). My plan was to learn all of the most used vocabulary, the grammar and then aggresively use the language. Read books, watch YouTube videos, chat with folk online. Best way to learn a language is to use it.

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.

Not really about piracy, but doing language exchanges is a great way to learn a language. You teach someone your language, they teach you theirs. It's free and it gives you more knowledge than any book. Natural languages don't work with strict rules usually, natives speak by feel, the only way to learn that feel is by interacting with people.

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.

Not a book, but check if your library has access to any learning apps for free... or books for that matter.

If you visit enough russian warez sites you will learn what Скачать means. Usually that's the second language of the pirate world after broken english.

For books my first stop is Anna's archive

Community colleges may offer cheap foreign language classes.

What is the book called? I can try searching for it.

As for learning languages, I find that a combination of structured lessons (from an instructor or recommended course book) with speaking practice (with someone you know or through a language exchange program) works best. Other things that help are watching films or series in your target language, listening to music and translating the text.

Look into Dreaming French (originally Dreaming Spanish but they recently extended to French).

There are a lot of language learning resources on the site i use. I did a whole Michel Thomas advanced audio course for portuguese that helped me learn the basics. What's the title of the french book your friend is looking for?

I just hung out with spanish speaking people and used duolingo (back when it was good) until I could speak and understand spanish. That way takes years though. I would recommend including structured classes for anyone who isn't an auditory learner.

Just use the AirLearn app. I'm learning Spanish on it. Pretty good. If you use an Android, there's also a premium APK mod for it.