I've been a professional translator for 35 years. During that time, I've learned several languages - but mainly for translation purposes. That means I was able to quickly get a very good reading knowledge in the language, allowing me to translate documents in that language into English.
However, I never really focused much on learning to speak my languages, with the exception of French and, to a lesser extent, Dutch.
Now, however, I'm changing the way I approach language learning: I'm focusing heavily on speaking and understanding the spoken language in order to reach functional conversational fluency as quickly as possible.
I lay out my programme and resources here and I hope you'll come along for the ride! :\)