When you are a moderately advanced student, you can learn new vocabulary with bilingual texts. These texts take several shapes. The most ubiquitous, at least for important languages, are books where a novel or short story is presented in the target language on the left and in your mother tongue on the right.

With careful comparison of both the original text and the translation, you can learn a lot about the language's structure and vocabulary. Remembering words requires re-reading many times the text but can bring good results. For many languages you can now find audio books so that you can both read the original text and hear it pronounced by a native at the same time.

There are other ways to get bilingual texts. You can buy a regular novel in your target language, then buy a regular translation in another language you speak. For instance, you buy 'Harry Potter' in Portuguese and buy another copy of a regular English language edition. This is less convenient to use than the bilingual editions and you will not have cultural and philological footnotes, but it gives you a much bigger choice of books at reasonable prices. And you don't have to choose a novel.

Another way is to find one of these newspaper websites that either translate foreign language articles into your target language (for Russian you can use www.inopressa.ru) or a regular newspaper that has English translations of some articles (for Serbo-Croatian you can use www.nacional.hr). Newspaper articless are easier and more appealing as they are shorter, use less vocabulary and offer a larger choice of topics renewed on a daily basis.