People are always looking for easy ways to learn languages. Having learnt several to a high degree I can honestly say that there isn't one! You have to work at it and work hard! Make no mistake about that. You can learn a language reasonably cheaply from a good language set that includes tapes and a dialogue based text book such as those Living Language produce. Look on Amazon for prices and availablilty - they cost around 55 bucks per 8 tape set. And yes, you DO have to work at it and learn it! Sure you can put the same information (or less of it)and put it on CD rom and charge a fortune. But that's just a gimmick! It's like the "Learn a language the way you did as a child" thing! Forget it! To be fair, Pimsleur is the least gimmicky stuff I've seen, but for what you get it's WAY overpriced! Yes, you get lots of cassettes, but remmeber that the material is recycled over and over again, so you're not really getting that much for your hard-earned. If you're rich then use them alongside your "real" langauge course, but don't expect to be super-fluent! And as for Easy Learn...sorry but they're crap! There's hardly anything in them for all that money you pay, there's hardly any grammar as such - but there are plenty of weird psycadelic stories about fancy-dress balls etc. Just what you need when you're out and about and lost in Dresden! And sorry Pete but using something that Winston Churchill said about languages to advertise the courses is laughable. I can't be bothered going back to look for the quote directly, but it was something on the lines of Winston Churchill said that you only need 500 words of a language. Churchill was never renouned as a linguist! You might just as well have said Michael Jackson once said that....
And anyway, I've only ever heard people who are really bad at languages make such sweeping statements about them as that one.
People! There are no easy ways to learn languages. Just buy a good, modern, academic course with tapes and make a concerted effort!
