I used Linguaphone PDQ to learn Russian last year, it was good enough to get by for a short visit but definitely nowhere near enough for fluency. Also, it was fine for listening and repeating but didn’t help out at all with written stuff so although it had things written in Cyrillic, there wasn’t enough help to make much sense of it all.
Immersion. Nothing else works as well. The only thing that comes close is learning from a teacher, with fellow students. No self-teaching program is going to come close to either of these.
Interesting.
I happen to have come across some audio files that are Pimsleur, as well as the 1st and 2nd CD’s of Arabic for Rosetta stone.
I think I’ll start with pimsleur in the car, for my 45 minute drive to/from work.
(Egyptian Arabic, from what I can tell)