I’m always jealous when I hear someone speaking something other than English and living where I live, that seems to be just about everyone. I would LOVE to speak more than one language fluently and I am so impressed when I meet people who do. I have studied Spanish for about 7 years and I would still classify myself as a beginner. I lived in Amsterdam for 3 years and studied Dutch almost every day and although I can understand most things, speaking is a different story. I also lived in Munich and found German to be really, really hard and according to this chart created by the Foreign Service German is harder than the other two languages I pretend to speak.  If you had to learn a new language, what method would you use? Would you approach this self-training the same way as you would train other people?

Note: I should add that I was asked in June of 2016 if I would deliver a presentation in Spanish the following year so I said yes thinking that would give me the motivation to finally improve. I was able to get through the presentation after a lot of stress and tons of prep but I also would not have been able to do it without a native speaker as co-presenter. If you are interested in that presentation, let me know.