Some of us do not have the luxury to take a 6 month language course taught by a proper language tutor. For instance when my wife and I won tickets to watch the Champions League final all the way in Istanbul, Turkey many years back, we only had two weeks to learn what we could.
So we got the necessary materials - Turkish foreign language learning software, some language learning DVDs and a dictionary. We got them all from our usual source - www.wor.com aka World Of Reading.
Mind you, since we were on the fast track to learn Turkish, we decided to get some materials meant for kids with the idea that they would be easier to digest. So we ended up learning a few Turkish songs along the way. It was fun and I think it really helped.
The good thing about the new language learning techniques used is that they teach you to listen and repeat sentences which you would most often use. So you can put them into practice as soon as you learn them. This makes memorizing them less of a chore.
I remember 20 years ago, this wasn't the case. We had to memorize words and grammar before we could use words in a sentence. It was very unnatural. This made learning a new language very cumbersome and tie consuming. Fortunately, studies have shown that the best way to learn a language is by listening and mimicking, like how children learn languages.
Since my wife and I were short of time, we learned only the essentials and we carried a cheat sheet and a dictionary just in case. This saved us a heap of time.
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