Here's a trick for learning a foreign language, take French for example. (Much of this is original with me. Don't expect any language instructor to endorse this. They'll probably condemn it.)
First, IMITATE how a French speaker talks in English. If you're old enough, think of Maurice Chevalier. (This can come out like a parody, so watch where you do this so nobody punches out your lights.) Imitate that speech as exactly as possible. Don't fake it -- listen to how such a person speaks and copy it, the exact phrases.
What that does is to train your ear in language sounds, intonation and accent. French, for example, is unaccented -- each syllable is evenly stressed which, to an American ear, sounds like they're stressing the wrong syllable. Especially note how they say "R" and "L" (these differ from language to language). Learn to imitate nasal vowels. (There are nasal vowels in English, but they're not so common as in French.)
So when you finish all that you'll be able to speak English like a Frenchman. Big deal? Well, now you only need to learn French. You're halfway there in terms of being UNDERSTOOD by a Frenchman. There's nothing more hideous than an American speaking French (or any other language than English) with a southern twang! The twang is okay for English -- Southerners come by it honestly -- but it has no place in French. (They have their own regional accents.) People who do this typically also butcher the French vowels. (I heard one such person say that he wouldn't imitate the French pronunciations because it "sounded silly"! He had no clue how he sounded to a Frenchman.)
Second, get a listen-and-repeat course that does NOT rely on reading (more than to confirm what you're hearing). Use "cue-and-review" to allow you to replay short sections of tape over and over till you get it. Believe it or not, you WILL learn a language simply by listening and repeating it and only later checking the text to see what you were saying. Pattern practices are essential for learning a language --
>I go to the store.< >He< "He goes to the store." >They< "They go to the store." <Library> "They go to the library." <walk> "They walk to the library." That sort of pattern practice.
When such courses were on cassette tapes, it was easy to play them on a cassette player with "cue and review" feature, but when I first got a course on CD's, I had to hunt down a CD player that had cue and review. Took some looking.
Third, ignore tenses completely. In English and many other language, you can say "Today I go to the store." or "Tomorrow I go to the store." or "Yesterday I go to the store." and you may sound illiterate but you WILL be understood.