RollingBlues

This. If you're going to be working anywhere within Quebec, french is completely necessary. As well, each province usually has a town with a "french district" like St. Boniface in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I would research where you are going to be working.

Make them speak it! For the love of God! I've seen so many people make this mistake. They hire tutors, they study endlessly. Then you talk to them and they freeze up! It's so important to make sure they practice speaking. Try to slowly shift your conversations with them to English as much as possible. Just like you can't improve your spelling without writing, you can't improve your speaking without having conversations in that language!

Anyone ever see try this website out? Basically, you correct people trying to learn your language, and in turn, you receive corrections. It's great for networking with people to trade languages with, so to speak. http://lang-8.com/ Plus, it's great for learning those slang words you can't really pick up in books, as well as getting native's recommendations for movies, books, etc in their language.

Rosetta stone certainly has an interesting idea, with it's total language immersion. I think that's perhaps one of the best ways to learn a language. The cost seems to be justified in the newer versions, where you can schedule classes with a teacher at no charge to help you go over the lessons. Overall, there's a lot of value in the software. Personally though, I don't much like it for a couple reasons. The first is that pretty much all of their pictures are recycled. You might not find this a big deal yourself, but it means that they pretty much skip over the culture of the country that speak that language. For me, that's the primary motivation, so I can immerse myself in the culture! Another is that they don't go over the writing systems in enough depth This is a big deal in languages like Arabic, Korean, etc. I also find the words you learn aren't very useful. I can't think of the last time I asked someone for a newspaper, for example. Overall it's a mixed bag, if it was significantly cheaper I would probably buy it regularly for more languages. As it stands, I tend to avoid it.