Language Learning Programs

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My son wants to improve his fluency in another language to add to his resume.
He's the OCD type who will probably go at it full-force if he starts.

Can anyone recommend a good program / site to use for fairly quick results?

There is no quick results, but in relative terms. As far as programs go, Fluent Forever and Glossika are pretty good in terms of developing the listening and speaking components. Fluent Forever is especially nice, as you can add as many sentences as you like to fill in holes.

I personally like starting with a phrase book to learn the basic language I need. In general, I like ones that have an audio component that I can use to train my ears with. Ideally, there'd be time with listening and reading to a large amount of material and time speaking and writing the language to help identify the holes that you need to more language to fill.

I've used duolingo and rosetta stone. My fluency got to be passable with both. My problem was not having anyone to converse with. With no practical use, I forgot a lot fairly quickly.

That's a common thing, although it is worth realizing that reading and listening are pretty much key to the process anyways. It's great if you've got the opportunity to converse with somebody, but most of the actual language learning comes from the input.

You don't generally forget all of it unless you go a very long time without using it. I remember my Chinese coming back when I hit the border and managing to get myself to the school I was going to work at on my own even though I hadn't done much with the language in the meantime.

Personally, I've gotten curious about AI chatbots as a method of practicing.

Which languages does your son want to learn?

Duolingo has many languages for people who want to learn to speak new languages.

Duolingo teaches things you likely won't use, and is overly repetitive. At least it can hold your attention though.

But a lot of people swear by Spaced Repetition systems like Anki....https://apps.ankiweb.net/ Basically, you give it the words you want to learn, and it tracks your progress, and tries to teach you and remind you just before the average person would forget the word. They have various lists that you can download that are prepared also.

I've been messing around with an AI chat bot. So far, it seems pretty decent, but it's very unstructured and I'm mostly using it to chat in my target language and then just drop in English words for whatever I don't know. The software provides me with a summary of the day's activities to my email and I can take those words and use them to generate appropriate flashcards covering things that I care about. It's talkpal, I'm not sure how it stacks up with other options. But, it does help a lot in terms of providing a whole bunch of feedback if you want it, but being completely able to decide on a case by case basis as to whether or not to even look at the available feed back.

IMHO, it's probably best for practice and helping to fill in the gaps for those that are stuck in between beginner materials and being confident communicating with native speakers.

It may not be exactly what you're looking for with a literal programme, but with pretty Bella teaching me Bulgarian, I'm melting down and going insane... especially with her telling me what she's wearing ... (GULP) I'm falling in love.

The first language you learn will be difficult and take a couple of years, and then the next will be easy and can be done with just simple association and using Google Translate, especially if the other languages are simply in the same language groups of languages you already know, like Bulgarian from Russian, Romanian from French, etc.... My advice though is to just use Google translate and translate texts back and forth and compare, and Youtube text translate for subtitles of videos and watch and try and follow along with the language you want to learn, and this comes quickly if you know the base alphabet and script.