Learning languages

You'll get phrases and things from a CD, but in my experience to really learn a language you need to do it with other people, and a teacher who can answer questions.

I think, as probably with most other subjects learned, it depends on your level of self discipline. You probably can learn the basics from a well structured series of CDs (though I can't recommend any, sorry) but only if you're the committed type. I have two langauges other than English but I know I couldn't have learned them on my own with CDs (not to the level I have anyway) because I wouldn't have got myself into a routine of working on them regularly.

So it depends on your friend really.

I'm with FtG on this one, if you really want to properly learn a language a class is the way to go.

Although for phrases and getting by while on vacation, I would use books/CD's. The BBC ones are quite good.

Thanks all. It's a fairly lame gift too, isn't it? Happy Christmas - educate yourself! I'll buy her something pretty and suggest evening classes instead.

Which language does she want to learn? Maybe you can give her a gift that is language related (if it's Spanish, you can get her an Almodovar DVD or something)

I've learned - or at least attempted - several languages over the years. In descending order of success (best first):

1) Italian

Two months in Italy, learning with native Italian speakers who refused to speak English until the very end, when one of them admitted that he was practically bilingual. Unsurprisingly, this is the foreign language I speak best, in that I find it easiest to slip into without thinking too much - though my vocabulary is pretty small compared with:

2) French

I studied this for seven years at school, up to A-level, though most of my teachers were English. As a result, I have a good structural grasp of the language and a big vocabulary (during the A-level stage, we were learning a hundred words a week for two years), and certainly find it easier reading French than any other foreign language. On the downside, though, I don't find it anything like as easy as Italian to speak - I never made that final leap that I managed to make instinctively with Italian.

3) German

Studied for three years at school, up to O-level, all of my teachers were English. Never really got on with this, partly because I was doing it at the same time as French (at which I was more advanced), partly because I disliked the teachers, and partly because I was never that keen on the language itself, though I've been warming to it of late. Aside from very brief visits to Germany, I haven't really used it since 1983, and I doubt it's any use for anything other than basic tourist stuff.

4) Czech

Studied for a few months in the early 1990s with a one-to-one teacher, then for about a year in a small class run by the London Czech Centre. Both teachers were native Czech speakers, and I reckon I probably reached a similar level to German: the problem with Slavic languages is that there's a huge learning curve at the start (all those Latinate case endings on top of a profusion of genders), so you need a pretty good grasp of grammar even to tackle relatively simple sentences.

Those are the languages that I've been taught by others, but I've also used CDs to give myself a very very basic smattering of Polish, Russian and Croatian (closest I could get to Bosnian, which I actually needed) - but we really aren't talking much more than pleasantries, food and pronunciation. I'm almost certainly going to have to learn Polish in the near future (I'm involved in lots of projects relating to Poland), and I'll definitely be going down the classroom route - or at least a one-to-one arrangement with a native speaker.

Also, when learning a particular language, I watch lots of films in said language - the great thing about DVDs is that you can generally switch the subtitles off or, in some cases, switch on subtitles in the language being spoken, which is even more handy. (I even went out of my way to buy a French DVD of the film Ridicule, as it revolves around a particular form of French wit that's largely untranslatable, and the British edition only had English subtitles).