I have lived in Germany now for a number of years but and have only recently formally "learnt" the language (to B1 level). I had some German before, I could understand gists of conversations but my speaking was poor.

I've tried watching dubbed stuff but I really can't stand it. I'd rather watch stuff in their native language, and then subtitles for whatever language. I did try playing games in German a couple of times a few years back but I disliked how quick spoken stuff disappears so without being able to replay the speech it makes it a useless learning technique for me.

I guess I should retry it, or find a game that requires reading and doesn't skip onto more text till I've told it too.

Little Big Adventure 1 & 2 for French

I used Japanese visual novels to practice the language. These are awesome because they often allow you to hear a sentence over and over again, with subtext.

What is less awesome is that most of the PC ones are kind of porn, but hey, if you skip that there are still some good ones. Another downside is that they often don't get male voice actors, so if you (like me) are interested on the listening side and don't care about reading, you miss half of the dialogue and renders a lot of them basically unplayable.

I recently got a new PSP and a bunch of japanese only titles, that should prove useful if I ever want to get into Japanese again. Not much time for that these days though, unfortunately.