Apropos of learning new programming languages, part of the way I familiarize myself with new programming languages (or technologies, as applicable) is by mainta

Apropos of learning new programming languages, part of the way I familiarize myself with new programming languages (or technologies, as applicable) is by maintaining a list of toy projects. These projects ought to be relatively well-defined. Big bonus points for being able to scale upward in complexity; some languages are more similar to others, and so it's less challenging to do basic stuff. Examples: IRC bot, todo app, text adventure, sudoku solver. Beware of getting stuck approaching these problems in the same ways as you did a previous language, though. :)