I think it is different for every learner. Each needs to find his or her perferred way or learning. I, for instance, don't have much use for a teacher or standard teaching material such as flash cards, exercises etc.

First and foremost I need to have some reason to learn. This does not only apply to languages, but when it comes to language, the reason I really learned English was because it was so incredibly useful, not because I had to learn it in school anyway. The music I liked was in English, the books I liked were written in English originally, the movies I liked were in English, the role-playing games I liked to play were often available only in English... It was pretty obvious to me even back then that knowing this language would be very useful.

I failed to learn Dutch and French as an adult, even though I tried, precisely because I lacked a real reason to learn the languages. Dutch isn't far enough from German to make it impossible to understand, though understanding spoken Dutch is quite hard. You can handle French texts if you had Latin at school, even if you were the worst student in class, which I was - and I have little use for French as a means of transporting culture (French novels, music don't interest me).

Now Russian is a whole other kettle of fish. I'm learning it because it is a challenge, which is a reason all on its own, but also because I'd love to be able to read Ночной дозор and other modern Russian fantastic literature in the original one day. There are quite a number of native speakers of Russian in Germany (3 million or so), and I have Russian-speaking neighbours the sons of whom are the same age and go to the same school as mine. We get invited to their family celebrations, and the language spoken there is Russian, most of the time. So I see a reason to learn the language, and these eight months of doing so I think I have come quite far; farther than if I had just visited a course in any case. I am already reading a novel in Russian, though not a fantastic one, and never without a dictionary nearby.

I probably have some aptitude for languages, after all, I studied English and German at university; but of course it is hard to assess one's own talent, as you never have a chance to understand how easy or hard learning a language is for someone else.

I follow a German podcast on learning Russian, I think this was very important for the basics. I am also in e-mail conversation with a couple of friends, which is at least partly in Russian. All in all, my approach is immersion and learning by doing rather than following exercises or trying to memorize rules or words.

Robin