Resources for Learning Foreign Languages?

Mudhiker asks: "I'm tired of being a stupid American and knowing only two spoken languages, I wanna learn some more of 'em. The options at my local bookstore are overwhelming, so I ask Slashdot: What are some good (never mind the cost) books, tapes, packages...whatever...for learning foreign languages? Short of enrolling in college again or moving myself to another country, what are my options?" We did a similar Ask Slashdot focusing on linguistic software for Linux back near the beginning of the year. What other resources would you suggest for someone looking to broaden their verbal skills beyond English?

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Having just learnt a new language (Swedish) from scratch (well, I'm still learning of course, but I speak Swedish more or less fluently now), I would say that it's not terribly effective to learn just from books / tapes / programs. You really need to take a course or something at the very least.

Why? Well, there are so many small things which a more static learning resource won't cover. There are thousands of exceptions to grammar rules, pronunciations etc which aren't covered in textbooks. On top of that, you need someone you can ask questions.

With that aside, it's pretty difficult to give any tips for software without knowing which language someone is interested in. For Swedish, there are several learning programs for instance, though they are all Windows based as far as I know. On top of that there's a whole bunch of websites, but they mostly handle specific parts of the language. (Like this course in Swedish cursing for instance:
http://www.santesson.com/curshome.htm

The final tip I would give is pick a language that you truly feel motivated to learn - like learning programming languages, it's difficult to learn something if you don't have particular goals for learning it. I mean I've never felt the need to learn OO languages so although I've looked into both Java and C++ I've never actually ended up making any progress with them. Similarly I was awful at French when I was in school, but picked up Swedish within a couple of years.

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