Excellent advice, @arbitrarykitten. I loved your story about your grandfather and how he learned English.

English is technically my third language, but everything I read is in English, I listen to English, I think and dream in English, and I speak sort-of Danish with my husband (who's French).

We live in Israel, but I've failed to learn Hebrew very well. I would love to, but since I make a living by writing in English, learning Hebrew is a past time project... and well, I could do better with it.

As for learning languages, back eons ago, our class learned a lot of Latin by reading a comic book, Asterix, in Latin. There were lots of repeated expressions, and of course, since we loved reading the funny story, we were motivated.

Years later, we moved to France (in 2000) with two kids who didn't know a word of French. My daughter soon spoke without any accent (she was 10) because they had to learn French poems by heart.