[adrian_b]

For me, the best way to learn a foreign language was (besides also studying the grammar separately) to read some books in whose content I was interested and to watch carefully some untranslated movies spoken in that language, until I became able to understand perfectly the books and the movies.

Now, with the free resources available on the Internet, both reading books and watching movies in foreign languages has become much easier.

So I have not used learning books, just grammars and dictionaries, together with exposure to large amounts of written and spoken language expressing a content in which I was interested.

Once you have learned one or two foreign languages, learning more becomes much easier, especially when they belong to the same language family as one of the languages that you already know.