If you are planning to learn more than one or two languages, I urge you strongly to study some elementary linguistics. Victoria Fromkin has written some wonderfully accessible introductory linguistics texts. Knowing how languages work in general, and in what ways they can vary, will let you see your own native language in a new light, and make the transition to a new language less mysterious. Especially make sure you learn some phonetics: that's the study of how your lungs, throat, and mouth actually produce the sounds of speech. And learn IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. More and more language books are using IPA to explain pronunciation; IPA avoids pitfalls like "a as in grass", and short-circuits ambiguous "phonetic transcriptions" of the "BWAY-noess DEE-ahss" variety. (I agree with our host that such transcriptions, the bread-and-butter of the Berlitz method, are way way better than nothing.) I must warn learners that sometimes it is not possible to learn to read fluently without understanding what you are reading. In Russian, for example, it is impossible to guess which syllable to stress without knowing quite a bit of grammar, and the pronunciation of many of the Russian vowels changes depending on whether or not they are stressed. In Hebrew, you must have some understanding of how the grammar works in order to guess the vowels at all, and you must have some idea what you are reading. The word written with the Hebrew letters mem, vav, resh, heh, for example (roughly, MWRH) can be pronounced moe-RAY (meaning a male teacher) or moe-RAH (meaning a female teacher), and without context you won't be able to read the word aloud correctly. So learning to read first is good advice when this is possible, but sometimes it is not possible. -- ACW