All the language learning material I see seems to follow the school example of just throwing information at you. Sure it works but I have seen something that works better. What I mean by better is achieving fluency in a shorter amount of time.
I do not have a lot of experience with language learning, but the way I understand it, is that languages basically consist of words and grammar, the grammar tells you how to turn words into sentences. And you express your thoughts through sentences. The way you measure fluency is by how many grammar rules you know and how well you know them but mostly how naturally the grammar rules comes to you.
People that i see who use language learning course(not apps like Duolingo) seems to learn the language and know it pretty well and they know the grammar rules of the language pretty well. But they struggle to actually speak the language. It seems like they are in "translating mode". They don't know the grammar well enough for it to come naturally, so they think of the sentence in English and translate it using the grammar rules they have learned.
I found out about the Michel Thomas audio CD's and they seem to work a lot better than doing some kind of language class. I also found out about languagetransfer.org, that is free and does basically the same kind of thing as Michel Thomas. There is also this YouTube channel about learning Esperanto that seems to work pretty well. The thing all these three have in common is that they focus on teaching you the grammar of the language in a more natural way. I don't know how to describe it, but they do it in such a way that it the grammar comes to you in a natural way, you are not in "translating mode". And after doing any of those courses (specifically Michel Thomas and Languagetransfer), it is up to you to expand your vocabulary.
So my question is, is there any research on these kinds of "natural" methods of learning a language?
