Over the last three years, I have been trying to learn languages by listening to language CDs when I drive. It is a great way to turn completely wasteful time into something fun. I started with German, but didn't go very far with it. When my commute to work got much shorter than it was, I stopped listening. I have been working with French for a while and recently I started to learn Spanish and re work with German. I can't claim to know any of them. I can hold conversations with patient Francophones and get the essence of newscasts. So far, I have not done much more than listening and talking to CDs and occasionally listening to news. I plan to add reading and other forms of practice to improve my vocabulary.

I was going to write something about learning (to speak) languages here, but I found comprehensive websites made by people with much more ability and experience-links are below.

I'll say just a few words about one particular difficulty that I initially faced (that I think was) due to differences between Indian and western languages. In Indian languages, the pronunciation of a letter when it occurs in a word is similar to the pronunciation of the name of that letter. Thus learning the alphabet and the vowel extensions practically guarantees the ability to pronounce any word in a reasonable way-All you have to do is read letter by letter (The right intonation still has to be learnt in order not to bore people to death) This is not at all true in western languages. So one has to completely give up reading letter by letter(letter by letter reading can make some languages, e.g. French, completely incomprehensible) and learn the pronunciation of letter groups, and sometimes, whole words. The best way is to listen to words and mimic them without thinking too much about how they are spelt. Worrying too much about spelling can result in distortions-e.g. different pronunciations of words that are really homophones(When I started to learn German, I already knew the spelling of many words and I was semi-consciously modifying the pronunciation to include all the written letters so that I wouldn't forget the right spelling).

I didn't fully appreciate these aspects until I started learning French(It is impossible not to!). Thankfully I started learning with Pimsleur's all audio course and it was months before I came to know that "Comment allez vous?" is written the way it is. I would have used a lot fewer letters or pronounced it completely differently :) It is best to learn pronunciation by mimicking the native speaker and spelling by reading. This is not to say that it is easy to acquire a native accent, but only that one can be comprehensible in a foreign language.

- Barry Farber's How To Learn Any Language is a nice book to read and dream about a fluently multilingual yourself. If you follow his instructions and put in some hard work, it might even happen :).

- Pimsleur's audio courses are very nicely designed and well suited to learn entirely by ear. The vocabulary is smaller than in other courses of comparable size, but you'll develop the correct pronunciation and the confidence to speak. Very expensive. The basic courses(8 half hour long lessons on 4 CDs) cost around $25 and can be found in many public libraries. It is worth going through them to get a good start on your pronunciation. The comprehensive courses are very expensive-around $220 for each of the three 16 CD sets-and can occasionally be found in public libraries. Sometimes used copies can be found at a reduced price on Amazon.

- Living Language all audio courses have a much wider vocabulary than Pimsleur. But they are single rep and sometimes the pauses are too short even for someone who knows the language to come up with the answer. There are occasional mistakes. Considering that they are 10 times less expensive than Pimsleur, they are worth trying out when you are not yet fully committed to learning a language. There are various flavors available-different levels, with negligible to significant reading material, and so on. The one I have used is "All Audio, Beginner-Intermediate" containing 6 CDs and costing around $25.

- Indo European Languages is a great website maintained by a student of linguistics and has tutorials on many languages. It is neat, plain, and concise(and free!). The tutorials(I have looked only at French in some detail) seem to follow the flow of Living Language basic-intermediate course and are therefore good resources to use in conjuction with the latter. There is also a page with a lot of links to language learning resources.

- How to learn any language is a website maintained by an aficianado of all audio learning. There seems to be a second(older) version of the same website with almost, but not completely identical contents. There are links to resources that the author has used and tips on language learning methods.

- Listening to French around New York: Radio France Internationale has news, radio broadcast, as well as learning resources. I listen to it on RealPlayer from the site or at 95.5FM after 8pm. There are broadcasts and French lessons which you can download(especially Infos en francais facile) and listen to at leisure. On TV, WNYE(ch. 25 in New York, ch. 18 from my cable provider, Patriot Media) has news in French from 7-730pm.

- I occasionally read Le Soir and Le Monde.

- Conversational clubs: I irregularly attended Cafe conversation at the Maison Francaise at Columbia University. Language meetup clubs, e.g. http://french.meetup.com seems to be useful to find local meeting places for foreign language conversations. Due to some schedule conflict or the other, haven't tried them out.