Excellent article with good tips. I particularly like the idea of learning the “total story” of a verb (all tenses) to begin with. That makes total sense to me: rather than carving up the poor verb into pieces, you learn it as an entity, as it occurs anywhere (any when, any mood). Great idea.

I would bet that your passive knowledge of Tamil helped a lot since that would have put in place some basic practice in switching languages.

One interesting idea to improve language learning — to learn it faster and better (being more fluent) — is to learn Esperanto first. This has been tested in school settings, where students being taught a target language (e.g., German) were divided into two groups: one group had a year of Esperanto followed by two years of German, the other group studied German for three years.

The first group, at the end of the 3-year experiment, knew more German and were more fluent than the group that had spent the entire three years studying German.

I don’t know that this would work with the accelerated self-study you were doing, but for those with more time to learn it might be a good hack. There are some quite good on-line Esperanto courses (e.g., lernu.net).