I'm learning French and Japanese (eventually), not Russian, but here are things I found useful:
- Live Mocha. I liked the old set up WAY WAY more, but since they're partnered up with Rosetta stone, they have a bunch of free stuff accessible to them.
- Duolingo. I found out about this from [MENTION=2]Ivy[/MENTION], and its a really fun thing to use. It's a bit picky, but its also free and you can use it on your phone.
- Yabla .. It's a website that has several languages on it, and while I don't pay for any of their videos, they have a demo video and they send you email updates sometimes with free lessons that are also on the site. so they'll explain something through a song, or a concept of how to use "Toujour vs encore" .. it's great, and infrequent.
- About.com .. The Japanese section AND the French section are both extremely useful and great free resources and they have a lot of in detail explanations.
- The 10 minutes a day books. They're very childish, which is okay with me, but more importantly they have awesome stickers. So you can literally stick stickers on things and read them every time you walk by them. So for the free version: you can look something up, write a notecard with the word on it, and tape it to the item, like the lamp or the fridge.
- thelocal.fr is a news website with French related material.. I'm sure someone somewhere has a website of English translated Russian stuff.. It's useful because they do all kinds of articles like "10 untranslatable concepts in French" and explain the idioms in English.
Principles I am currently using:
- I converted all of my cuss words to French. At least significantly less people will understand what it means, since I can't stop cussing at all.
- Look up the 10 most commonly used verbs, and start working with them. You can create a LOT of sentences if you can say the very, very basics. Nouns come with practice, but verbs will get you practicing them more.
- Meet-up with native speakers. If at all possible. I go to French meet-up groups and I love listening to them speak fluently. I don't understand anything, but I'm okay with that. I just want to listen.