Do you read regularly in your target language? Well, do you? Well, why not? What's your excuse? Not enough time? Boy, if I had a euro for every time I've heard that.
It seems to me that there are few better ways of learning vocabulary than reading novels, stories, poems, newspapers, textbooks, etc. written in the language you want to learn. Of course, we could memorize long lists of vocabulary words, but research shows that unless we use those words relatively soon after learning them, and use them frequently thereafter, they don't stick. It has been my experience that the most painless way to increase my word stash in French or Italian is by reading daily. It doesn't matter too much what you read. Sometimes I'll pull up Le Monde on the Internet and skim the headlines or check out the culture section. Other days I'll read a short story or a chapter or two of a novel, preferably something easy and fast-moving, like a policier or thriller or western. I've been prodding through Mort sur le Nil for several months. If you're reading fiction, it's best to find a piece with lots of dialogue; after all it's conversation that's going to be most useful to us, if we want to eventually become fluent.
Again, you Spanishfreaks out there are lucky. In the U.S. it's easy to download hundreds of public domain books in Spanish and you can find oodles of used books in Spanish on Amazon or Thriftbooks.com. Locating books in French is not too difficult either. But when it comes to Italian, the pickings are slim. It's not too hard to find some Italian books on the 'Net, but they are not as numerous (or cheap) as Spanish and French. Still, with persistence, you can find reasonably priced Italian texts. There are also a few sites that have free public domain Italian books you can download. I've had good luck at www.libroaudio.it. You can find free audio books there in mp3 format. I've downloaded Treasure Island and other action-packed classics from there. They are all read by an excellent reader who dramatizes them with sound effects. Yo, yo, yo e una bottiglia di rum! Lot's of fun.
For me, I learn and remember vocabulary much better if it's in the context of complete sentences. I've tried books dedicated to learning foreign language vocabulary, but I haven't run across any that structures the exercises and practice around using the words in sentences and dialogue.
And don't fool yourself. Though the language-geeks will try to convince you that only a bare-bones vocabulary is needed to get by in a foreign language, I have not found this to be the case. Many a time have I struggled to find alternative ways of expressing an idea in conversation or writing, because I can't for the life of me come up with a word that expresses what I want to say. Knowing how to say the yellow cat is on the large table is not going to help you if you're lost and need some directions--unless you happen to be a yellow cat and the table on which you frequently lounge has been moved, I suppose.
So then, leggi, la mia amica! Lisez! Read, you lazy-assed, good-for-nothing slacker! Oh, dear. How emotional I get when I talk about learning languages. :)
One method you might consider is practicing expressing yourself (in English) with the bare minimum of words, and absolutely no idioms. I got quite good at this in Korea, where on the first day I learned that fluent English coming out of my mouth did more harm than good. The trick is to speak 'telegraph' English without sounding as if you are (you'll sound arrogant). In Korea, I had to speak this way in order to communicate even the most basic ideas. For you, though, the goal would be for you to see that you can indeed express yourself in Italian (say) with a bare minimum of words.
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