I have to be honest with you, I think it's really really hard to make headway in something like that without taking a class :v Lack of structure and someone to correct your mistakes makes progressing very difficult. I do think a social site like Lang-8 (among others) is a useful tool once you have the basics down.
One of my childhood friends married a Spanish fluent American. They' ve got three languages covered. My lil nephew was very confused when he met their daughter, she' s as young as him so she doesn' t quite grasp yet that she' s not supposed to switch language mid sentence. And set your consoles default language on that language if it is available (unfortunately I don' t think Pashtun is an option).
Yeah I use that one. Duolingo is fab. It's a language learning site that uses repetition and feels like a game because you can level up and get points and stuff. Downside is, it's great for learning vocab and sentence structure, but kinda sh*t at other stuff. Basically, you can't use it by itself.
Learning languages isn't really supposed to be easy. Apart from your native language which you pretty much get from people around you. I've bean leaning German on my own for about...well, just shy of a decade I suppose. I can read it pretty well and I know a few words. But would I try speaking with a native German in their own language? Probably not. [ Luckily, they're pretty understanding and appreciate the effort. Or at least I've found. ] On a different note, I have heard from non-English speakers how much of a ***** the English language is to learn. For instance, read and read. They're the same word written but spoken aloud they have different meanings. And they're/their/there is another one ESL learners have difficulty with, as do a number of native English speakers.
Seeing movies, music, video games really helps. But without any level of context is pretty difficult. For me learning english was like 4 years of the"to be" verb plus entertainment sundely I understood it. It depends the difficulty of the other language and proximity towards your mother tongue. Portuguese is pretty close to Spanish, so even without classes it is possible to "understand" each other, but to truly learn the differences without using the common thing of your mother tongue is hard. For example "embaraçada" in portuguese means ashamed in spanish "embarazada" means pregnant.
My Spanish teacher used to call those "false friends", most were "gallicisms". Confusing at first glance, no biggie once you understand their underlying logic. In this case both imply carrying a burden, just different kinds of burden. The English and the French agree with the Portuguese on that one (embarrassed, embarrassé). I' ve only learned English and Spanish though, both share a fair amount of common ground with the French language. I get the feeling it wouldn' t be as easy peasy for me to learn a more distant language just by watching TV (like say moon sp... I mean Japanese).
