Learning a foreign language could mean watching foreign movies, listening to foreign music or radio, reading foreign magazines and newspapers, and discovering the latest craze on television in that foreign country. The internet truly puts the world at our fingertips, and it only takes a few clicks and searches to bring you foreign music, podcasts, videos, and more. If you want to challenge yourself, try watching a film---say, a French film---with subtitles in French. Of course, learning a language involves more than passively receiving it, but using foreign media could pique your interest in a foreign culture and drive your motivation to keep learning.
Many foreign language publishers provide software or online learning opportunities to test skills covered in structured lessons. In more sophisticated software packages, you can practice your pronunciation by recording your voice and listening to how it sounds in relation to the proper pronunciation. Interactive language tools have the advantage of providing you with self-awareness and confidence that traditional textbooks cannot deliver. In this way, you may develop confidence, a crucial component for speaking a foreign language, when you find yourself in conversation with a native speaker. The Internet provides a virtually limitless medium for communication with native speakers on chat, message forums, and blogs. In these corners of the net, you can discover the idiosyncrasies of a language in use. Just remember that not everybody uses perfect grammar or spelling on the web.
Prior to the Internet and interactive software, people still managed to learn foreign languages the old-fashioned way: through textbooks, exercise books, and dictionaries. Admittedly, learning a language strictly using books requires a special type of resolve and ability to concentrate. Textbooks and dictionaries can give you a proper foundation in a language, but the real test happens out in the real world, where the language lives in the conversations and writings of everyday people. However, if contact with native speakers proves impossible, it never hurts to have a dictionary on-hand to define that word upon which an entire sentence's meaning hinges. For some things, books still get the job done.