http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/200...s-a-favor/

An interesting article i found via digg, he makes some good points about how a lot of the grammar rules of a language can be learned just by learning individual sentences that demonstrate these uses.

Well.. i think it is more about analyzing the language before you decide if you are going to want to learn it. He does suggest, one should pick a language that's close some language you already know, in order to pick it up fast. He must be talking about spoken language.
They are good ideas, but as you said; common sense (with a provocative title).
I know a guy who claims, he's able to speak about 23 languages, but when you check, which languages, it turns out that most of them are very closely related to each other but no really "hard" languages.
That approach works if you want to be able to impress ignorant people with the amount of different languages you can ask directions in. (which can be fun btw! ;p)

[ファブリス]

I remember reading an article called Japanese for Nerds (here it is), and that really made a difference for me back then. After reading it I finally was making sense out of sentences, seeing all the parts coming together and how they related to each other. Now that I'm looking at it again I see it was the part "The heart of Japanese grammar", that's like the whole Japanese grammar in 5 minutes.

Thanks ファブリス for linking to that article, I thought it was only me who thought Japanese was like a programming language, I think of particles like delimiters and various other parts of Japanese seem to fit in my mind being a CompSci. guy.

Sounds more like: How to determine in an hour how hard a language is to learn, as opposed to actually learning it.

"How to find out what a good Wikipedia article on any language would say...even if there isn't one!"