A useful site I found this week is Radio Lingua, which offers podcasts to help you learn Spanish, French and German, or the basics of Polish, Irish, German and Russian in one minute chunks. The one minute podcasts are also available here.

Learning languages a little at a time like this seems to be quite a good way to get started. Most of the language courses I’ve tried tend to throw you straight into quite complex dialogues, which are often about subjects that are of little interest or relevance. However, one of my Irish courses, Irish On Your Own/Now You’re Talking, includes a lot of short dialogues and I found it much more useful.