as most of you know, i'm into learning languages, and particularly into trying out any method that might possibly make me learn them better or faster. for a few years now my theory has been that in order to make your mind as "flexible" as possible when it comes to language, you should learn in this manner:

become decent at esperanto —> a pidgin language —> a creole language —> learn a normal language

for example:
1. esperanto, 2. chinook jargon or toki pona, 3. indonesian, 4. japanese or icelandic or russian

i don't mean mastery, i just mean learn to understand at least 80% of each one before moving on to the next one.

then if you want to learn a ton of normal languages (ex. german and french and icelandic and indonesian and...) instead of just one, you should go back as far as possible to the ancient language and learn a lot of ancient vocabulary (grammar's more unnecessary but at least glance at it) before continuing on to the modern language. ex:

ancient indo-european —> ancient germanic —> modern swedish/icelandic/german

(generally speaking, most people want Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and/or Germanic derived languages; so they'd pick proto-Indo-European. like, even Indonesian and Chinese have been noticably affected by Sanskrit as far as i've read)

this is because the ancient language usually has the stock vocabulary of all the other languages, with just a few sound changes or dead words. like, "mother" (moðr) "eat" (æt) "water" (vatn) "red" (rauð), these are all super old words. then when we take a fancy foreign word like erythrocyte, we've just borrowed that language's stock word (erythro, red). of course you need to know modern words like "internet" but y'know that's just "inter" and "net(work)" so yeah, stock words all around. humans languages are simple if you know the original meaning of what you're looking at.

as far as grammar is concerned, ancient languages often have more complicated but also more regular grammar, that explains a bunch of irregular weird remnant stuff in the modern language. there's a lot of stuff like the present-tense ending (-ar, -er) in swedish actually has the same origin as the one in english (-s, -es), or this one piece of grammar in language x is exactly the same in language y even if it was dropped in languages m, n, p and z, all of which you notice if you go back a bit in history - and stuff like that helps you learn faster.

anyway, i read online that you can get to "business level" (as in, understand everything at work, in the news etc) in indonesian in 3 months; and by studying just 30 minutes a day you can get to conversational level (=90% of all normal stuff but not news or business meetings) in one month. if you live in indonesia. also read that no matter where you go in asia, if you know indonesian it looks really good on your CV since everyone does business or tourism with indonesia / malaysia. i had some idea of the first part but no idea about the last part - i guess learning indonesian will help me get jobs in japan.

two years ago is when i last looked at indonesian, attacking fanfic with a dictionary and making a word frequency list; i ended up learning rather a lot of common-use (in fanfic) words, but couldn't find any proper grammar explanations anywhere - the ones i found contradicted themselves or their own example words, etc. the indonesian-english dictionaries were also unusably bad. now i'm good enough at japanese to where i can use japanese materials for learning (which aren't that great but are better than the english ones anyway), and an exchange student (though we have no classes together) speaks at least some malaysian so i can ask him for help. the other cool thing is, i now have a smartphone that has an indonesian language option, so games and stuff will automatically use their indonesian translations.

so!!!! when i feel like it, in my free time, i'll start learning indonesian again. the truth is i want to make a contest out of this and see JUST how fast i can learn it (how far can i get in a month?!) but at this point i'm using japanese 5-7 hours a day (1.5 to 6 at school, then 1-4 hours reading or watching tv at home) and i don't really want to take away from that. i have to think about how much time i really want to "waste" on it...