I like learning languages using movies. First you have to choose some familiar movie, which you probably seen many times and you know well what they talk about in different scenes even if you mute the sound out. Something with easy plot like Matrix :P
Then you have to find a dubbed version of that movie in language you want to learn, and what is rather difficult, you have to also find subtitles which do exactly match the spoken words. It is crucially important to find them equal. Many subtitles which you can download from web are heavily different by their content, and so cannot be used.
After I found a right version of movie and matching subtitles I use to play it round and round, so I continually embed a proper pronunciation into memory (they say - repeating is a mother of knowledge). As I know the background of the movie I may sometimes decipher meaning even when they use words I don't know yet, and so learn them from context. And if I don't know, that is where subtitles come to place, I can pause movie and look up the meaning in dictionary.
The key is, that anything I learn during watching movie I immediately associate with a moments of that movie and thus it writes into my memory with a less chance to be forgotten :P what is the main problem of human memory
And you can watch the movie on the background, you don't have to sit there and look at it all the time. Watch it e.g. when you cook alongside
you cannot absorb whole movie during one evening anyway.
ps: i don't know however whether this method would be any good for learning kanji :P