Sorry for taking so long to respond.
There are various frequency lists on wiktionary.org and they can also be found on the internet.

The link to the wiktionary frequency lists is:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

My progress: It’s been three months now since I started accumulating french audio vocabulary via anki and listening to the radio.
I attempted to converse with a native French speaker a couple of weeks ago and as long as she spoke slowly I could more or less do it. I had big gaps in my ability to reproduce, however, but I’d say I had more than enough passive vocabulary to carry me through.

My understanding of full speed radio is still low, though I can consistently get two to three full sentences at a time now depending on the accent of the speaker and the topic being spoken about.

On the productive side I have no clue how to construct certain verb structures but I can speak in the present and the compound past and compound future.

I am curious where you get a frequency word list? Do you create your own? Can it be downloaded? I think it could help me too. Thx.

For that Anki is the bomb.
I previously used Supermemo to learn Spanish and it worked well in the sense that I had tons of vocabulary but I found I could speak broken Spanish reasonably well but couldn’t understand anything. It wasn’t until I had about six months of watching telenovelas that I was able to more or less understand. Spanish was pretty good because it’s phonetic so the pronunciation was easy, the problem was I eventually figured it was hard for the brain to make the connection between the written word and the actual sound of the word in my head. I think it was more than double the effort. Since my goal was to become fluent in the *spoken* language I found the written language to be interfering.

I’m now learning French and I’m ignoring written text altogether this time and focusing purely on audio. I’m using a word frequency list and getting mp3 files of the individual words into Anki as well as listening to the French radio over the internet. I find that certain words and phrases that I don’t have in Anki are starting to stick in my head without me knowing what the English equivalent is and I’m starting to get the flow of it without actually understanding everything that’s been said. Sometimes I can get whole chunks of the conversation and other times I get very little, but I’m getting there. wikipedia is an excellent source of .ogg audio files for french. So is shtooka.net and so is audiofrench.com. For German there is beolingus online dictionary.
Google translate also has spoken text for translations in French, German and English though the sound quality is not great. That said, the sound quality is better than nothing on google and would work as a last resort to get an idea of how the word is actually pronounced compared to how you think it’s pronounced.

On a side note, the same thing happened with Spanish [picking up tons of words by sheer exposure]. There were a few words here and there that came up in the telenovelas always in the same situation. I didn’t even need to look up the English equivalent. After a few weeks I just *knew* what they meant. From that perspective, if your goal is anything other than being able to translate texts, listening to a TON of audio is a key component in the quest.

Anyways, great blog.

@Rene, to add to what Peter said, try listening when you think you’re too tired to understand anything. I mean like when you’re almost ready to fall asleep. You might be surprised at how some words jump right out at you because you’re no longer straining to understand everything at once.

Also, try listening to weather reports. It seems those are always what I’ve been able to understand first. Also try soap operas, as they use a lot of simple, every day vocabulary with plenty of drama to help you understand from the context. Kids’ shows might help, too, since the actors may speak a little more slowly and use simpler words.

@Rene: When watching TV don’t focus on the language at all. Just watch and try to guess what is happening. Pick movies/shows that would be easy to understand even on mute. If you can understand, even vaguely, what is going on in the scene, that’s all you need. Don’t even think about language or word meaning or anything. The language falls into place on its own over time. That’s my experience learning Japanese anyway.

I am learning Italian myself and I am trying to listen to Italian radio stations, watching Italian movies en television. However, I find it hard to understand anything of the things I hear. Will it come with time or is there a better approach?

I’m also very guilty of not listening to enough material in my current Spanish studies, with the result that I can read and write Spanish, but when I hear the language spoken, I’m lost. I’m starting to take action to correct this now.