Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
I speak several languages. In my personal experience practicing speaking and listening with a number of different native speakers (to learn to understand people with different accents and to make sure that different people can all understand you) is the most important. This will make you actually think in the foreign language. Watching TV and listening to the radio also helps greatly.
Reading comes into play only once you have reached a certain level of proficiency and want to "upgrade" your skills. Reading will help you to perfect your sentence structure and expand your vocabulary.
I agree with Frostschutz that learning grammar through studying is a pain-in-the-you-know-what and it is much easier to acquire a feeling for what sounds right or wrong through listening and reading rather than by learning the rules.
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I also speak several languages and agree with most of this. The most important thing you can do is spend as much time as possible with native speakers. But once you have a basic knowledge, reading can be a good way of expanding what you know. But I don't really think that reading leads to fluency very directly. But indirectly it helps a lot, as it can massively increase your vocabulary and give you examples of grammatical sentences. But reading is a passive skill; the hard part about fluency is the active part where you produce the sentences yourself.
Re: grammar - for most languages, you have to learn grammar; there's no way around it. If you want to say "I have eaten" in French, you need to know that "ai" is the form of "avoir" that goes with "Je," and that "mangé" is the form of "manger" that means eaten when used with "J'ai."
But you don't necessarily need to know that "je" is a first person singular pronoun, that "mangé" is a past participle, or that the sentence is written in the present perfect tense and is in the indicative mood and the active voice.
(Eventually knowing this will be useful, especially if you learn additional languages. But early on, you need a few rules and a lot of examples and practice).