> Weekly lessons here and there helped but I really didn't start climbing up the pretty-steep Salsa learning curve until I started messing up on the dance floor dancing with random women.

I wonder if the adrenaline and stress makes a big difference. For example, I've been trying to improve my German for roughly forever, trying assorted books and CDs and such, but the best results have come from going to a weekly class.

Even without (much) studying I learn all sorts of things, and I think it's because I'm put on the spot to read things, conjugated verbs, make up sentences, and so on.

All of the real-time pressure (though, really, it's fun overall) seems to make a big impression on my brain.

Now I need to try speaking German to random women. :)

I was stuck in a German harbour alone for around 2 weeks two years ago, as my boat's engine had failed and needed repairs. Since I had nothing better to do I decided that I would try to learn as much German as possible. So I basically just started talking to strangers...

After two weeks I could actually survive through a conversation. When I started I knew no German at all.

A friend once said it to me best

desire > ability

There's obviously no better way to learn then to immerse yourself in the culture, but you'd be surprised how many friends come back from a year abroad and have minimal gains.

to learn a language, try every time you meet someone in German, or even using online dictionary, spend 30 minutes talking/ asking questions/ writing down how to say that.

review it every day for at least an hour

learning a language takes a ton of diligence, and I've found that I often forgot what I learned if I didn't repeat it every single day for a good bit of time

soon, your mind will begin to think in the language ( a scary thought for me, a mono-lingual speaker at birth)

In my experience (and my teacher's), vocabulary is the biggest obstacle to understanding and being understood. I'm learning Turkish now, and I'm trying to do 40 words/day. It turns out, in the languages I know, you can usually follow

Subject + verb infinitive + object

and people will understand. Of course, grammar is important, but I hate it when I have to say "he is very good" instead of "he is quite good" because I don't know the right word.

I've heard that you need 3000 words to be reasonably comfortable in a language. With 40 words/day, that's still 3 months, which should be enough to pick up grammar if you actually talk to people and study a bit on the side.

You spoke at birth?

The salsa dancing parallel reminds me of learning to snowboard - I signed up for a week long trip through a group at my school and took lessons the first day on the mountain. Before embarking, I had read a bunch of articles on how to snowboard and tried to commit all the information to memory. So I got out there and tried to apply my knowledge to little avail. At the end of 5 days, my knees made the nurse in our group cringe. I was absolutely battered head to toe. Then I went home and read as much as I could find over the next year and went back. Much to my amazement, things came together; I was suddenly and surprisingly decent.

I think this same kind of learning process applies to anything that you really have to understand to get good at. Many things have two levels of understanding: most people can drive, but who really understands how the transmission works? Those are the people that are able to truly control a vehicle, and they probably drive manuals.

I learned to dance salsa a couple of years ago with my ex-girlfriend, it just takes a lot of practice, and is much better if you have a good teacher. Some alcohol might help too :P.

Learning is not hard, unless you're studying something that you don't like, for example years in school when I started studying Logic it was a real pain. Later when I started learning statistics I figured out that logic is awesome, and is the basis of many many things.

We learn more through our mistakes than our successes. And now there's research to prove it:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=mom-was-right

Sorry about the paywall, but you can get the gist from the summary.