Learning a second language?

Is there any literature that gradually introduces a second language as a learning tool?

• Are there any books or articles that start in one language, and slowly introduce words, sentences and concepts in another language, such that by the end of the literature you're digesting a substantial portion of that second language? This may sound odd, but it seems like a possible method for language learning or comprehension.

• Answer:

  This is not exactly the same thing, but I have a series of books meant for students of Chinese that can already speak and understand the language. (For those that don't know, Chinese characters have almost no connection to the spoken language and must be learned by themselves). The textbooks  start out in full pinyin (romanized Chinese - not characters), and work their way up to full characters. This is really hard to explain. I'll try to illustrate it later. Anyway, I found it to be a quite effective way to learn the characters. On the other hand, trying to do this with, say English and Chinese would be VERY difficult if not impossible because of the differences in language structure, grammar, etc. Let's try "How are you?" in Chinese: 你好吗 － "you" "good" "question particle" It wouldn't be clear what you were trying to say at any one time. What would you replace and how would you know what was meant? Another way to illustrate the trouble with this method is by using Google translate. The reason this so often results in a terrible translation is that so many things can't be translated word for word. Maybe for languages that are closer to each other, it could work somewhat. But for the most part, I think it would just result in confusion.