Take my shower... please!
Studying languages is often an exercise in embarrassing yourself. You have to make mistakes in order to learn.
I lived with a family in Latvia for a year between high school and college as an exchange student. While I prided myself in being a quick study, I would sometimes find myself latching on to phrases before I knew their true meaning. Other times, it seems I got ahead of myself trying to put phrases together on my own.
There was one bathroom in the apartment where I lived, with the shower, sink, and toilet all in one room. When I wanted to take a shower, I would warn the rest of my family in case they needed to use the facilities.
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Finally, an excuse to watch more movies!
Foreign films are a great way to practice a new language. You can learn by watching them with or without subtitles, and pausing and rewinding to hear a sentence or two over again if you need to. Not to mention the very helpful fact of having audio with clear visual aides, language set in real life situations, and plenty of cultural information.
The ease at which you can rent foreign films online or in stores these days makes them an ideal and, importantly, fun way to learn more about a language and the culture of places where it is spoken. For example, here are some great French staples that you can watch as a student of French.
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I was watching TV the other night, and I saw a commercial for language courses that made a promise that I've heard far too many times: you can learn [insert language here] just like you learned English!
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Also on the blog this month:
Yo: a gender-neutral pronoun? Young Baltimorians invented a new English pronoun.
Mapping Language: Europe, 1730 What did people speak back then?
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 Speaking "Indian"
"Do you speak Indian?" is an inevitable question for many people of South Asian descent. Even though 'Indian' isn't really a language, it's understandable why people prefer that term. With 22 national languages in India, and many more non-national ones, not even those who ask "Do you speak Hindi, Malayalam, or Telugu?" cover all the bases.
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