Our family is a bit multi-lingual.
My daughter and I are moderately fluent in Indonesian, and we are currently studying Mandarin Chinese. I have lost most of the Spanish I learned in high school, though I can still understand it a little. I had one year of Biblical Greek way back in college.
My wife is from Singapore and in addition to English, she speaks Hokkien and Mandarin fluently and understands Cantonese fairly well. She is studying Indonesian.
It is confusing to determine which method is best for learning a language. Most of the languages we know were learned somewhat naturally as we either grew up with those languages or were exposed to them continually later in life. However, after making a new friend who visited our church from Gabon, after hearing him speak English fairly fluently, I was shocked to learn that just five months earlier he did not know any English at all.
However, the reason he was able to catch on so fast was that he attended a full-time English school here in the United States for those five months studying English exclusively for several hours each day. Most of us do not have that opportunity. Even so, while each language course has its pros and cons, most all of them can help a person learn to speak a little, and then becoming fluent will eventually require some heavy-duty saturation in the language.
Again, each language course has its pros and cons, and if you really want to learn a language quickly and learn it well enough to prepare yourself to become saturated in that language later, it may help to make use of more than one method.
For example, my wife and I use Rosetta Stone on our computer at home. She uses it to learn Indonesian and I use it to learn Mandarin. The program offers different modes of learning. One is where you are shown four pictures and you listen to the native speaker say something and you choose which picture is appropriate. The benefit they are trying to help you receive from this is to think directly in the language you are learning rather than relying on translating and remembering individual words. This makes sense because it is almost how children learn their first language. However, I find it extremely helpful to work with it together with some other learning program.
Unforgetable Languages
When I am driving to and from work, rather than wasting the time, I have Unforgetable Languages on my MP3 player. Unforgetable Languages uses a link system to give you a little crutch to pick up a larger vocabulary more quickly and retain it. For instance, the word for “dog” in Mandarin sounds a little like “Go” as in “Go to get a dog”, so they might tell you to think about going to get a dog for about 10 seconds and then go to the next word. After giving you a few words, they ask you to translate those words into English, and then they ask you to translate them from English into Mandarin. Later, you will be taught small grammar lessons and put the words you have learned to use.
Whatever method you use, repitition over a period of time seems to be necessary to reinforce what you learn and make it natural for you.
Rocket Languages
I have not used these lessons myself, but they apparently offer a free introduction where you can buy the courses if you like them. Rosetta Stone does something similar as do some of the others.
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