There is no better teacher than to actually go out and speak the language, so I'm not surprised you got good results one-on-one. Similarly, but probably with less efficiency, I'd like to recommend Michel Thomas' language tapes. They focus entirely on conversation and active use of the language.

One thing we should shy away from is the marketing message of "learning like children", like Rosetta Stone is doing. It is fairly well documented that adults can learn languages at least close to as well as children [0][1], but adults learn differently.

Here's something you can do as an adult which a child lacks the prerequisite hooks to do:

- English words ending in -ible or -able – possible, table, comfortable, probable – have the same meaning in French. They're pronounced differently (ending sounds like -sibl or -abl in French, not -səbl̩ or -eɪbəl)

- Same with -ent and -ant: important, different, etc. Usually adds an -e when writing. (pronounced with -ɑ̃ not -ənt)

- Also words ending in -ary: Military, necessary. Change the ending to -aire when writing. (pr. -ɛʁ not -ɛɹi)

- Lastly, -ence + -ance: Difference, importance. (pr. -ɑ̃s not -əns)

Congratulations, you now know well over 1000 words in French.

0: http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/myths.html 1: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201309/ho...

Michel Thomas is excellent - I learned enough French from his course (having never learned any French before) to have some basic conversations with people I was staying with in France. Nothing groundbreaking or deep, but general basic chit chat about the weather, what to do, where to go, how to get there etc.

+1 for Michel Thomas audio courses.

Where did you find the people online? I've looked at http://www.italki.com/, but not much else.

I mostly use italki, a lot of teachers advertise on gumtree in the UK for face-to-face lessons and will also do Skype lessons.

Ah, thank you! I'll definitely be signing up there, then. I'm not in the UK, and our version (craigslist) doesn't really have the userbase for language lessons, but I might try posting a want ad.

A language learning site that greets me in computer-translated German "Werden Sie fließend in jeder Sprache" makes me hesitate. Am I supposed to turn into fluid?

I moved to Rome and got a job at a small Italian company with just a handful of other people. I'd never studied Italian before (but French and Latin, yes) and just simply turning up and having to struggle through reading and writing emails in Italian, talking to people in Italian, even terribly broken and incorrect Italian, has done for me in 6 months what would have taken about 8 years of non-intensive study. My grammar isn't great but that's for lack of actively studying it, I'm too busy. Even still, I self-correct all the time and my conversational and comprehension skills are comparatively through the roof. There really is no substitute for immersion and practice. The more familiar with something you become, the more you start to recognise patterns and where your own styles fall down -- you start to notice that others use certain prepositions in a context where you'd use a different one, and you check and self-correct. All the time you're getting better and more comfortable with the whole process; listening, speaking, pronunciation, stringing more and more complex sentences together. It's a holistic process and there is simply no substitute for jumping in the deep end, and the more organic and 'real' it can be, the better. A stale classroom a few times a week is almost doing you a disservice by making you think you're studying -- you might be better off saving your time until you can commit yourself to it properly (for e.g. reading a newspaper every day, speaking for an hour every day with a native speaker, reading and writing in forums/IRC in that language).

Personally I found watching films with subtitles (the original subtitles, I mean - same stuff they're saying on the screen, like a version for hearing-impaired people) very helpful in learning

I'm sure you enjoy Rome. Beautiful city. I am from Italy, but I live in San Francisco.