Starting at age 27 I learned French, Spanish, and Italian to a pretty good level: I can understand movies and usually communicate with native speakers without a

Starting at age 27 I learned French, Spanish, and Italian to a pretty good level: I can understand movies and usually communicate with native speakers without asking them to slow down or switch to English. I used a combination of Assimil (a book + cd series), reading news, listening to the radio, and taking some lessons on italki. I focused on French only for the first ~two years (at the time I was interested only in French and had no ambitions of being "multilingual" or anything). After that Spanish and Italian were much simpler to pick up thanks to shared vocabulary and grammar. I had no background in linguistics or learning languages apart from (almost entirely forgotten) high school Spanish and a bit of classical Greek in college.