Reddit reviews Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

How much study time do you have available per day? Have you ever learned a foreign language successfully before? Do you speak any other Romance languages fluently?

Assuming you can study at least two hours per day, I would recommend:

1. Get Assimil's New French with Ease with the CD, and do two lessons per day. Spend 30 minutes on each lesson, following whatever variation of the Assimil Dutch instructions pleases you. In 25 days, this will give you a good, basic intuition for how French works, and teach you some useful vocabulary. The nice thing about Assimil is that if you follow the instructions, it works well for almost everybody, and it produces solid results. If you want a grammar overview to go with Assimil, get Essential French Grammar, which is dirt cheap, focused only on the essentials, and an excellent complement to Assimil.
   
2. Since you need to speak very soon, get Benny Lewis's book, which has some good advice on efficiently mastering survival stuff and polite conversation starting very early on.
   
3. A week or two before you leave, skim How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately, which is the bible of dirty tricks for faking a better level than you have. Definitely do his "islands" exercise, and prepare 10 or so islands, getting them corrected on lang-8.
   
   If you think of yourself as a hardcore geek, and you're generally good with languages, there are also a couple of ways to boost your listening comprehension substantially in 30–100 hours.
   
   Total cost: Less than $100, plus some money for iTalki tutors if you follow Benny's advice. But expect to work really, really hard—faking intermediate French after 30 days is a bit like sprinting straight up a steep mountain with a heavy pack. You're trying to compress 350 classroom hours into a month, which means working very hard and efficiently.
   
   Anyway, if you can spend an hour a day on Assimil, and an hour a day on Benny's speaking advice, then you'll get some pretty useful survival French under your belt by the end of the month. Going further than that will probably require studying obsessively.

Lots of people won't pay, that's true. But it's also true that many will. Learning a language involves a huge time commitment and for many people accelerating that has a lot of value. Benny Lewis talks about ways to learn for free, but people can and do pay him for some of his products:

• "Fluent in 3 Months" book on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062282697/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0062282697&linkCode=as2&tag=fluein3mont-20
  
  
• $97 "Plus" package: http://fi3mplus.com/premium/
  
  So it's tough but not impossible.

Thank you for such a detailed response!

http://myanimelist.net/animelist/nrkid9

Manga is actually what got me into the whole thing, and during my junior year of high school a friend convinced me to watch Angel Beats. Everything on that MAL is what happened afterwards. I must say that anime did change my life and it's probably the driving factor in why I want to learn Japanese.

I have been reading this book on language learning to pick up some tips and it has been an interesting read so far.

Living in the states, immersion isn't easy to achieve. I'm currently taking my first semester of Japanese at a community college I'm attending and the teacher has made the whole experience fun and exciting.

Fluent in 3 months is another way of basically doing what /u/ixian_probe is suggesting.