I learned Portuguese by:
(1) looking up words I thought were important in the dictionary
and spending hours memorizing them.  I wrote a little program to
help me with this.
(2) chatting online in IRC channels with lots of Brazillians

After about 3 months of this, I went to Brazil.  I could hardly
speak or understand a spoken word... only read and write.  When I
arrived, about 10 friends that I'd met on IRC met me at the airport.
And, in Brazillian culture, girls always kiss you on the cheek...
so I had all these girls kissing me, and I couldn't even ask them
who they were!  (Not that I was complaining!)

Anyway, I spent as much time as possible trying to talk to people,
and after about three weeks, it was possible to have conversations.
I also spent lots of time reading grammar books, etc.
After about that point, I didn't need to spend much effort to learn...
it just came naturally by using the language.

I think this is a pretty typical experience.

So, they moral of the story is:
(1) you need to learn enough of the language to have basic
conversation.  By basic, I mean "enough to be understood", not
"able to say basic things like how are you".  You need enough
to have real, interesting conversations.  You also need to learn
very well how to express things like: "I didn't understand the
second word... the one before X".

(2) Once you've done (1), just keep using the language.  Make
friends!  It should all come naturally.

Therefore, any course on languages should focus on (1).  I did
do a few courses on Portuguese, but I found them totally useless
(except, perhaps, to hear how things are pronounced).  They
focused on things like colours and food.  These are useless for
acheiving (1).

Anyway, I have lots of friends who would like to learn a language
(mostly Brazillians wanting to learn English, but also a few in
the other direction!).

So, here's my advice for doing (1):
* start with small word lists, and gradually grow them.
* focus ruthlessly on what's important.
* I'd rank from highest-to-lowest the importance of these areas of
vocab:
	- some stock phrases for saying what you did or didn't understand!
	- pronouns
	- verbs
	- a small number of adjectives and adverbs
	- prepositions (these tend to be really hard to learn, since
	there is rarely a good translation)
	- look up nouns in the dictionary as you need them.  They
usually don't have broad applicability - they really depend on
what comes up in conversation
* grammar-wise: I guess this depends on the language, but for me:
	- conjugation of verbs... I think present indicative, and
	perfect-past indicitave (or whatever they're called) are
	the most important.  You can often use auxilary verbs
	(eg: "vou fazer" in pt)... so do that where you can, to begin
	with.  It makes learning so much easier/quicker!



So, to help with this: I think I should tidy up my little
scripts for learning words, and my word lists, and add a few
features for allowing "progressing" (i.e. starting with a small
number of words, and growing).

For grammar, I think I big bank of examples would suffice.
Even though I'm good at dealing with theory (I'm a computer scientist,
who's spent half of his life dealing with formal computer languages!),
I found grammar books to be ambiguous, and quite painful.