I've taken an interest in learning foreign languages, recently. I was an exchange student in Germany in high school, and I have found a few hours of weekly children's programming in German, which is a good way to collect vocabulary words. One great thing they're doing right now is reading the German translation of Rudyard Kipling's "Jungle Book." I can get the public domain German text of that novel, and then listen to the audio, and make long vocabulary lists. One thing I'm seeing is that in any one book, the author (or translator) will tend to use the same vocabulary over and over - so reading a novel is a good way to see words in all kinds of different contexts.

I've chosen Norwegian as a next language to study, because I really admire the Scandinavian way of thinking about the world. Also, Norwegians seem to me to be the people who master the American English accent with the most finesse. This must say something about the society's pedagogy when it comes to language instruction.

I bought this great introductory audio course for learning Norwegian by Margaretha Danbolt-Simons. It's only for absolute beginners like myself. It's very well designed to help you to perfect a good Norwegian accent. Grammar issues are introduced in a very easy to digest way - but things are told to you as soon as you need them. Again, this certainly is NOT something that people will want to buy if they have any background at all in the language already.

It seems to me that Norwegian is probably one of the closest languages to English. The northern parts of the British Isles were heavily influenced by the Scandinavians, before the Normans (French) took over in 1066. It's quite refreshing to gaze deeply into the roots of one's own language.