Language learning

I'm sure that I'm not alone in my first taste of a foreign language being at school, when I started being taught French around the age of 10. And I mean being taught French rather than learning the thing. Classrooms full of teenagers are not great places to build a working relationship with a language, but at least they force you to do it. This has been an ongoing problem for me in my post-school attempts to learn languages. I have dabbled in a few: Japanese, Turkish and Spanish - but I haven't really got anywhere near fluent. I could hold a basic conversation in Japanese, even read and write a bit - night classes helped there. I could order food and drink in Turkish, again night classes were a big help. Spanish I struggled with - no night class.

But, despite mixed results, I'm keen - really keen - to avoid being one of those English speakers who relies on the fact that "everyone speaks English". I really want to be able to converse in another language and there sure are a lot of them on this little planet of ours, but I have decided to learn German. The main reason for this choice, apart from being interested in the similarities with English and generally liking Germany, is that my significant other studied German at school and I thought I'd have a much better chance of getting somewhere if there was someone nearby I could talk to. That's the theory.

But how best to take a foreign language and cram it into your head? I'll list the things I am doing and then take suggestions from the floor.

1. I've got myself a copy of Teach Yourself Complete German, with the CD. I have found these courses pretty good in the past, so getting this one seemed like a good starter for ten.
2. I've also bought the more advanced Enjoy German course, also from Teach Yourself, which is supposed to inspire me to make progress. This sort of manoeuvre has never worked in the past, but what the hell.
3. I am trying out the Learning German Through Storytelling series of detective stories on the Kindle (also available in paperback). Each chapter ends with a list of the significant words and then a short multiple choice quiz covering what you have read. In German of course. This gives you real German (the language learning courses can feel a bit contrived), introduces new words and makes you think about what you are reading. It's aimed at intermediate to advanced learners, but I'm still finding it a great resource.
4. Duolingo. If you haven't found this already, I really recommend it. As well as the website, it is available as an app on Android, iPhone and I think Windows Mobile. The Android app is not really that great for initial learning, but for practice, revision and picking up extra vocabulary, it works really well. There is more information, grammar and such, on the website.
5. I do like a bit of technology and have for a couple of years had a Raspberry Pi plugged into my TV. This is now running a system called OSMC (a version of Kodi/XBMC) which has a lot of available add-ons, one of which is for ARD Mediathek, the German equivalent to BBC iPlayer. So now I can watch German TV at home for that immersive experience. Really useful for picking up the rhythm of the language.
6. When I was learning Turkish, I listened to a lot of Turkish pop music and there were a couple of songs I knew well enough to sing along with. My teacher used to say I had very good pronunciation and I'm sure that singing along, mimicking the singer's pronunciation, was the reason. So I am trying this approach again and have bought the album Alles Auf Anfang by Silbermond. In addition to simply listening, I've picked a couple of songs I really like and found both the German lyrics and the translation on the interweb. That way I can sing along to help my pronunciation and also learn some language that isn't in your average course book. Double win.
7. Finally, I have a spreadsheet in Google Drive with a schedule. The 23 lessons in the Complete German course and the 10 lessons in Enjoy German are listed with planned start/end dates and spaces for actual start/end dates. I can track progress and perhaps shame myself into doing a little bit of work every week.

So that's what I'm doing and I may add to that as I work through Benny Lewis's book Fluent in 3 Months, which seems to contain a lot of ideas. But for now I think reading, writing and listening are covered in some depth, but speaking practice is going to be a problem.

What do you do when learning a language? Any suggestions are very welcome, particularly on the speaking front. I could just call up random German people on Skype, I suppose...