I've been enjoying these 18-min podcasts covering the basics of French for the past couple days. After trying the first 3, I went ahead and pressed Get in iTunes last night to grab all the others.
Shortly after doing that, the French Ecole site went down due to exceeding bandwidth. Oops.
Michelle and I made it through a summer in France barely knowing how to say the numbers one and two, much less anything else. We did acquire an ability to read the signs (from Latin and Spanish language similarities as well as context cues). Then there was the debacle that was us asking for 6 bus tickets to use for the week (much use of fingers and pleading looks).
Hopefully the next time we go there we can communicate natively, if in only a slightly less rudimentary way.