What languages do you speak? read? write?

[RoundTower]

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CTS,

I have both the Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone for every language I know. Completing both of these programs will not get you remotely near being able to actually speak, read, or write these languages. It will give you perhaps the most basic of understandings, but you won't be close to conversational or able to read/write anything more advanced than a child in kindergarten at best.

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I don't know much about either of these programs but this really sounds like all you need to get started. Once you understand the basics you can start trying to puzzle your way through a newspaper or a novel or watch a film in the foreign language. Watching a German film with German subtitles will actually help you a lot if you can read better than you can understand, it is much better for you than a German film with English subtitles where it is too easy to tune out and not really listen.

Unless you are lucky enough to know some German people you won't get much conversational practice outside the German-speaking countries. Although I did strike up a conversation with two old ladies who had lived in Argentina almost all their lives, in a Buenos Aires hospital waiting room.