How come there are no good self-study language learning books...

How come there are no good self-study language learning books? All of the books I've found are either made for accompanying a class or some awful shit that's just random bits of information scattered throughout the book.
I just want a book which would have actual paragraphs describing the concepts it's teaching, like grammar. Is this possible or am missing some glaring flaw which is the reason books like this don't exist? I prefer books over those shitty websites which give you fish instead of teaching you how to fish.

I just want to learn Spanish. ;_;

1- where are you from? italy?
2- fuck the books dude, if you are in spain, and want to learn spanish... just, go to the street, speak with people, go to partys, try to make new friends, that's the best way to learn... look at the mexicans who cross the borders... a year later they speak english so fucking good without a book.

This guy gets it. If you want to learn the complex grammatical structure of a language and be good on paper then buy all the shit that you can, but if you want to actually be able to speak you need to surround yourself with the language and use it as often as you can.

We get a lot of immigrants here and a lot of them manage conversational level Finnish in under a year since they don't all know how to read or write.

We got there Internet to surround ourselves with.

I'm only here for a couple of weeks and I'm not the most social person (where do you think we are?). While I do agree that you have to talk and utilize the language to learn it, I still feel very inadequate without a solid foundation. Grammar would make up that foundation.

After caving in and trying those shitty websites, I realized that the most through way to learn a language is in school or a proper language course.

School is not a proper way to learn a language in my experience, classes progress at an extremely slow pace and often people graduate without even being able to converse after several years. At least where I am, many of my friends who chose Spanish as their third language (you can choose between German, French, Spanish and Chinese) were still working on the fucking present tense after 3 years (THREE YEARS) of classes, and they could barely even introduce themselves. Only those who actually put effort into it can learn it, and my combined ~4 years of French classes didn't achieve nothing either, I just didn't really care and the pace was extremely slow exactly because of the majority not really giving a fuck.

I managed to get to a B2-ish level of Spanish in 3 months, which means that I could have conversations and write somewhat-well-articulated texts, while still having a small vocabulary and somewhat having to ask people to repeat, having to think about word choice etc. It's been about 6 months since I've started now, and I'm still hovering between B2 and C1.

The good thing about Spanish is that it's a huge language, there are a ton of resources of you take the time to look. I never used a "language book" ever, I simply watched videos to get started with the grammar and worked my way forward.

Part 1/2 because this is getting long

really considering BRAAAPing on vocaroo

>The good thing about Spanish is that it's a huge language

>tfw I want to learn Icelandic and it's fucking hard to get sources.
I haven't seen a single book for learning Icelandic in any library (here in Barcelona).
Surprisingly, the Nordic Institute is offering classes, but they seem expensive.

Part 2/2

To get started I simply googled my way to basic tutorials on grammar and word placement etc. I reckon I downloaded a torrent which gave me a huge compendium of everything there is to know about Spanish grammar, with examples and explanations (and up-to-date). I can't find trace of this download right now (maybe it was from int?) but if you want I can send it to you.

During that, I also intently watched youtube videos about Spanish learning, from channels such as SergiMartinEspañol, TheSpanishDude (this guy's pronunciation is shit but good grammar guides) and especially Easy Spanish from the channel Easy Languages, in which natives just walk around the street in different countries and ask people things, where it is subtitled in English and Spanish at the same time. Really useful stuff.

Another major helper was watching dubbed movies, you can find dubbed movies for free on sites like mejortorrent (Spanish from Spain, torrent form) or pelisplanet (Latino Spanish in stream form, my favorite site for this). Watch movies you've already watched in English, so you'll never get lost. Because even if you don't understand everything in a sentence, you'll "know" what they're saying already and that'll make it easier to actually understand what they're saying in Spanish. Same goes for books, download or buy books you've already read in English and get them in Spanish, it's gonna be really hard at first but since you already know what it says it won't be a problem. Have Google Translate at your side and work through it, you'll improve as you go along.

As other people said in this thread, there is no equivalent regarding speaking practice than actually speaking to people. For me it was a bit hard because I live in Denmark, but I did get in contact with some local Spanish speakers, but I solved that by taking online classes on Italki (which could be a bit expensive though).

Let me know if you have questions, buena suerte user

How the fuck did you get to B2 in three months? I'm struggling for about two months with German and still only rate myself at the border between A1 and 2.

Well I just did what I just explained, I had/have a lot of freetime so I just spent almost all my time learning Spanish. I already had a French "basis" so some things came easily at first just because of the similarities. But yeah, you just gotta surround yourself with the language constantly, and put great effort into making progress every single day. For me, that meant: practicing with my spanish-speaking girlfriend, watching tons of videos, keeping a diary in Spanish, taking online classes with professional tutors, watching dubbed movies/series all the time, changing the language in my videogames to Spanish, changing the language on my phone to Spanish - essentially convert your entire life into as-if you lived in a Spanish country, consume all entertainment in Spanish without exceptions. 3 months is doable with enough effort, but a lot of people don't have the time/willpower/motivation to do it that fast

I see, good tips.

If you're not a fucking normie ?

All this shit doesn't have anything to do with being a normie. My girlfriend lives over 14000 kilometers away and I barely get to see her, it was a miracle I found her during her exchange as she's the girl who's furthest away from the vapid conformist bitch ideal that most women go for around here that i've ever met.

To do all this shit you don't even have to leave your house, but I guess if taking paid online lessons is too scary for you and your "muh social anxiety" then perhaps you should just accept that you'll probably never learn how to speak naturally and fluently, don't know what else to tell you

>want to learn a language
>buy a self-study book
i will never understand why people do this

>My girlfriend lives over 14000 kilometers
bolivian gf

spanish is spoken by 1.50cm goblins in americas. study another language lad

Argentinian

Thanks for the tips.
Your way of learning seems to be exactly the thing which is giving me a headache. Basically just feeding yourself tiny bits of information here and there. I don't know, but I feel like I need to have a strong and meticulously planned out skeleton for learning it.
I do agree that immersing yourself into the language helps greatly. I will definitely do that.

It's for us indecisive ones who for strange reasons don't want to attend a language class or those who aren't ready to just start talking to Spanish speaking people.

But if the person you care about lives in Spain and there's a tiny chance of you moving there and living in a Spanish speaking country, it's an acceptable thing to do.

third world user
> a tiny chance of you moving there
no jobs and low wages ,

and poverty

It's still better than my country (Bosnia).