I subscribe to podcasts and watch a couple video presentations.

The idea is to quickly get an understanding for the concepts behind the language, when you dive into the topics you already have a mind map to file them under. This also gives you a feeling for the community.

Next I read the top questions on stack overflow and join the IRC channel on freenode.

By learning from the common pitfalls made by others this saves me from a lot of startup frustrations which would otherwise prevent me from actually using the language.