What to think about before learning a language

Today I came across an interesting blog post by a man named Tim Ferriss. He wrote a detailed account about what to think about before choosing a language, and how to assess the language's difficulty. He broke it down into 8 basic sentences. Each sentence tells you something about the target language's use of case, gender, etc.

The apple is red.
It is John’s apple.
I give John the apple.
We give him the apple.
He gives it to John.
She gives it to him.

and

I must give it to him.
I want to give it to her.

By looking at how these sentences are said in a language, you can tell a lot of things. You can tell the way the language shows ownership of objects and the use of modals. These might be big words for some people, but they are not that hard to understand once you learn the words of learning words. I suggest you check it out. He is on to something! He de-constructed Arabic in 45 minutes. I've been looking at ways to "cut the fat" of language learning for some time, and this guy has made a career out of doing it for all facets of his life.

Here's a snippet of what he said:

Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it. During my thesis research at Princeton, which focused on neuroscience and unorthodox acquisition of Japanese by native English speakers, as well as when redesigning curricula for Berlitz, this neglected deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners

Link
How to learn (but not master) any language in under one hour