Whimemsz wrote:Thomas Payne's Describing Morphosyntax is excellent for learning some of the different morphosyntactic strategies and categories that can be found in various languages. I'm less well-equipped to suggest books on contemporary theories--most recent introductory textbooks will probably have some helpful info.
That book is
not beginner friendly at all and somewhat limited in scope and use. I would say that was intermediate-to-advanced and very,
very boring. It's a good, well-written work, but would suggest it's not appropriate for a beginner. I honestly don't know why people on this board fart rainbows in celebration of that book; it's, like,
fine but it's not this magical insta-linguist tome of great power and influence.
Here is an introduction to linguistics by a lecturer at the University of Indiana. Read the bits that you think look interesting, then skim read the other bits.
Go to your library and look for books by David Crystal. He knows what he's on about and is an easy read.
Zompist's LCK is a good quick-and-dirty overview of linguistics, and I highly recommend it.
LanguageLog, as Whimemsz said, is very good. Also look at David Crystal's blog and
http://www.languagehat.com, both of which are general linguistics blogs. Not everything will interest you, but have a look now and again and something might make you want to research it further.
It's worth getting familiar with the IPA, at least of English. Wikipedia has good "IPA for [Language]" pages. X-Sampa is an IPA encoding that is mostly used online for convenience and is rarely seen in the wild, but a passing familiarity with it wouldn't go amiss.
Learn what a morpheme is and then what morphology is. Learn a bit about meaning, and what a word actually is (or isn't). Learn a bit about how people make sounds, and how people tell sounds apart or lump them together. If you're feeling really bored, learn a bit about syntax trees and read dumbed down versions of Chomsky (he waffles a bit, so it's honestly easier to just read the summary).