If you don’t know another language well, you’re pretty much doomed to produce ciphers of English. Checking out grammars (or this Kit) can help you avoid duplicating English grammar, and give you some neat ideas to try out; but the real difficulty is in the lexicon. If all you know is English, you’ll tend to duplicate the structure and idioms of the English vocabulary. Below I’ll give you some hints on minimizing this problem.

Learn other languages, if you can. If languages are difficult for you, just skim a grammar for nice ideas to steal. Bernard Comrie’s The World’s Major Languages contains meaty descriptions of fifty languages. Anatole Lyovin’s An Introduction to the Languages of the World readably surveys all the world’s language families, pointing out touristic highlights, and gives more detailed sketches of some important languages Comrie skips.

Looking at some non-Indo-European languages, such as Quechua (see my intro to Quechua here ), Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, or Swahili, can be eye-opening.

It’s easier, no doubt, to create a logical language, and desirable if you want to create an auxiliary interlanguage ( auxlang ), à la Esperanto. The danger here is a) creating a system so pristine, so abstract, that it’s also impossible to learn; or b) not noticing when you reproduce some illogicality present in the models you’re using. Ask me about the irregularities of Esperanto sometime .

I personally like naturalistic languages, so my constructed languages ( conlangs ) are full of irregularities, quirky lexical derivations, and interesting idioms.