Learning a language as an adult has lots of advantages: you know your learning style, you have the motivation to learn even when it’s not fun, etc. However there’s also some pitfalls to avoid.
At the very beginning of learning a language there’s a couple things to avoid that are going to help a lot in the long term. They are – taking grammar from your native language, and pronunciation from your native language.
It might sound strange to think you can “choose” to not use your own pronunciation, and in some cases it’s unavoidable (most people will have an accent on some level). However what I’m referring to is unconsciously or consciously trying to map the sounds of a new language to the language(s) you already speak. It’s really important in the beginning to treat a new language as just a series of noises, really try to mimic what you hear (shadowing is great for this) rather than assuming anything.
The other aspect is grammar. It’s very easy to unconsciously use your native grammar, especially for any cases where you haven’t learned the proper grammar yet. The way to avoid this is a bit hard to explain, but basically it’s the same as the accent note above, you want to go into the new language assuming nothing. In the first 100 hours or so of learning be very diligent to make no assumptions and to take the new language grammar as it is. By doing this you can “replace” your initial tendency to use your native language grammar. It will usually take ~100 hours or so (napkin math), but the real sign that you are in a good place and can relax a bit is that you are able to make guesses and extrapolate new situations in the new language relatively accurately. Meaning when you have a new situation come up that you haven’t seen (some kind of new sentence combination) you can be mostly correct in how you form that sentence (based on guesses from other examples you have seen) with no/minor errors. Once you have reached this point its good to continue pushing your limits by trying new sentence combinations (and being corrected if necessary) to keep expanding your flexibility and comfort with the language – try saying things in new ways vs the ways you have already become comfortable with.
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