Quote Originally Posted by johngalt View Post
I started out using Pimsleur, then found rosetta stone. Then after reading some posts here, I discovered that some experienced speakers feel rosetta has too many limitations.
I see. Thank you for your feedback!
I have heard of users of Pimsleur, and, based upon such information, I believe the <i>Pimsleur</i> series is particularly good for learning pronunciation and articulation. (Mostly due, of course, to the audio CDs.)

Quote Originally Posted by iCake View Post
Don't know if learners of other languages are allowed to comment here But since you're clearly asking people who've had experience with learning a language, I'll dare share what it's been like for me.

I dabbled in grammar first to get some grasp what the language is all about. When I was somewhat good at it, I moved on to expanding my vocabulary. I did it, well, still am doing by reading some adapted texts at first, then started to take on more complex writing. When I got to the point where I could understand about 70% of pretty much anything I managed to put my hands on I decided to concentrate on listening comrehension. Mind you that I'm not talking about overcomplicated stuff like scientific articles or whatnot, just simple reads any native speaker would comprehend. Anyway, listening comprehension was mostly trained through watching movies, TV shows, youtube videos, podcats etc. Whatever I did I always stuck to one simple rule though, no captions or subtitles, even if I couldn't understand anything at all. In fact, at the beginning I couldn't make out much, usually not even a single word. But it all started to clear up rather quickly and now I rarely have any problems hearing what's being said, even if it's a completely new word for me. I'm more than sure it's a direct result of refusing to resort to subtitles.

The things I also stuck to were these:

- practice your language everyday, even if it's as short as 15 minutes. 15 minutes a day will do more good than a whole, but a single day of studing per week.
- when the mood to say "to hell with all this" struck me, I just told myself that I'd accomplished far too much to slam on the brakes now. Gotta appreciate my time and effort.
- using a monolingual dictionary. Nothing helps learn a language more than it does.
- if you don't like what you're doing, find something else to do. You have to enjoy it to actually learn something, otherwise you'll get bored and will not remember anything useful.
Thank you very much for the excellently detailed reply! Though there is no universal strategy to learn every single language in the same manner (for example, Mandarin and Spanish would be learned in moderately different ways), the principles and patterns are still mostly similar. So your general pattern went: Grammar -> Vocabulary -> Reading Comprehension -> Listening Comprehension? At what point did you begin to speak the language aloud, if I may ask?

Quote Originally Posted by RedFox View Post
memrise.com
Hm, a most interesting site, indeed! I shall bookmark it. Thank you for sharing!

Quote Originally Posted by alexei90 View Post
I started on the internet with learning Cyrillic and then branching off from there. Essentially, a crap-ton of google searches and practicing on my own in the car, at home, whathaveyou.
The Internet is a wonderful reserve of free knowledge, isn't it? Haha! Yet it seems to have worked! Why fork out hundreds of dollars for a complete textbook when much of the material is available for free on the web?

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I do have another question for those willing to answer:
How long did it take you (from beginning to learn Russian seriously) to reach intermediate and/or advanced levels of fluency? (Of course, "intermediate" and "advanced" are very subjective terms, so, if you cannot draw such a distinction, then simply: how long did it take you to be able to speak and write the Russian language well?)