It sounds like you need conversational French rather than a course. Don't know if you are near a Uni or something, but how about advertising for someone French to practice with?

I don't believe you can learn any language at an advanced, let alone fluent, level from a CD, which sounds like is what you want to do. You have to take classes or move to a French speaking area or at least use it a lot. You can try listening to French news everyday for starters, if you can get it on cable or the internet, and reading French newspapers and novels a lot. That would certainly help your vocabulary and fluency. Listening to Cds in cars won't cut it.

I don't know where you live; in some cities there is a Croatian community that might be able to provide resources?

Croatian is much more difficult to learn than French (IMO).

Having a conversational partner or tutor is a good idea if at all possible.

Failing that, look for content on websites ending in .hr (the Croat name of Croatia is Hrvatska, as you know) or YouTube videos in Croatian (good source of "street" Croatian, since there is a huge gap between what we are taught in school and what we actually speak in any language). I have learned masses of French usage on YouTube.

I don't think Croatian is harder than French. They just come from different language groups. My sister taught herself Czech to a fairly high level and found that she could understand a lot of Polish and the South Slav languages. Relatives by marriage who had studied Bulgarian at the military language school in Monterrey quickly understood Russian and had little difficulty with Croatian on a trip there.

For reading, find an English language book that you know well and read it in a Croat translation. Newspapers, of course, are available on the web.

I don't know where you live, but many cities have language exchange nights at the local library. If your city doesn't have this, then you can look for people who are interested in language exchange on Craigslist.com. This would certainly help improve your french as it should not be too hard to find native French speakers. Croatian will probably be a bit harder unless you happen to live near a community of Croatian people. Also, keep in mind that they speak almost the same language in Bosnia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia, so you can learn quite a bit from anyone from the region.

Have you tried RosettaStone?

I have heard of people Skyping with language tutors directly from the country they are wanting to visit.

I was just reading an article yesterday in the New York Times today about learning languages using the internet, including video chats and language feedback programs. You should look it up. It was in Saturday's newspaper.

Thank you all for your replies; you've given me a lot of food for thought. There's no question that speaking to native speakers is the best way to learn. I'll look up the NY Times article and I also love the Skype suggestion. We live in a relatively rural area, in a small town, so unfortunately we don't have the resources locally that larger cities have.

Ellen