Hello! I want to share my experience of learning foreign languages. I can speak English and a little German. I'm studying them at the university for 4 and 3 years. I studied English at school as well.
So, now I'm trying to improve my German to speak and understand better. That's why I'll provide links to german sites.
To understand a foreing language one must know lots of words, and that, of course, demands plenty of time and patience. If you want to enrich your vocabulary, you need:

1. to read a foreign book. You can start from children's books. Don't be ashamed. With each new book (no matter how simple and thin it is) you will feel more confident.
2. to divide it into sections, e.g. sport, politics, crime, art, or even smaller, football, elections, court, music etc. You can use phrasebooks (a minimum), special lexical reference books in your own language, then different articles (you can easily do this in the internet) on specific themes.
   http://www.ego4u.de/de/cram-up/vocabulary , http://bobych.ru/deutsch/ , http://www.talktalk.co.uk/reference/phrases/german/data/phrase_finder.html
   
3. to listen foreign speech in order to get used to it. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,2547,00.html , http://www.youtube.com/user/deutschewelle?blend=2&ob=4
   
4. to use any source in the internet that can help you to learn foreign languages.
   http://www.deutschlern.net/
   

Learn and practice! Find penfriends and communicate with them! Good luck!
Thank you for reading my blog.