Tower of Babel

What's the best way to immerse yourself in your destination?  Learn the language!

If you've already studied foreign languages in high school or college, you're all set.

If you need a refresher or want to pick up a new language, here are the resources I found useful:

• Textbooks
• These are useful for learning grammar and spelling and for practicing writing and reading skills
• My sources: Amazon.com for used textbooks (old editions are sufficient), used book sales
• Specifically, I own or have read all or part of:
• Italian- Oggi in Italia
• German- Alles Gute!, Neue Horizonte, Deutsch Sprache and Landeskunde
• Online learning modules from Mango Languages are available for free from  many public libraries.
• Mango consists of self-paced modules featuring a seemingly intimidating conversation at the beginning of the lesson that is your 'goal' as you work to deconstruct the dialog during the lesson.  
• There is a lot of repetition, which is useful for learning
• The English and foreign language are juxtaposed and color-coded
• You can click on the word to hear it repeated as much as you would like
• If you have a microphone, you can record and compare your accent to the standard reference
• Units 1 and 2, if available for your language of interest, are part of the library subscription package.  They cover very basic material.
• Subjects include- greetings, shopping, sightseeing, eating out, weather, direction, basic medical terms
• It took me about 10 months total to complete both Units 1 and 2 for two languages. I completed about 1-2 lessons per weekday and 2-4 lessons per weekend day, with an occasional day or a week of break.
• Each lesson takes about 10-20 minutes to complete.
• Units 3 and 4, if you're interested in more in-depth learning, require individual subscription which is currently under $180 a year. 
• Subjects include- arts, history, more medical terms, customs, hotel, chores, sports
• Audio learning (CD-roms)
• Pimsleur has 5 levels of several major languages.  These levels may be split depending on what version you have, i.e. IA and IB  = level I.
• Level I for the one language I tried consists of 30 lessons split among 18 CD-roms.
• It comes with a reading booklet consisting of a list of vocabulary words.  The words correspond with past or future lessons.
• Each lesson takes 30 minutes to complete.  The last 5 minutes is devoted to reading the vocabulary list in the 'reading' booklet.
• Pimsleur also has smaller collections, for example, of Swiss German which consists of ~10 CDs
• I used Pimsleur after already having learned the basics with Mango and textbooks.  If you try Pimsleur by itself, I think your grammar and spelling skills will be deficient.  It depends on how you learn best.  I'm quite a visual person, so seeing the words and how they're spelled makes a lot of difference to how I learn, so Pimsleur is not good for the visual learner.  Pimsleur is good auditory reinforcement of words that I previously learned audiovisually.
• A disadvantage is that I cannot get the CD to save where I left off when using a CD player, so I end up having to finish the 30 minute lesson so as to not have to repeat material.  If you use a computer or other device with a time tracker, you can resume at the time where you last left off.