Are there any good courses for practical machine learning (that uses an actual language)? I tried out Andrew Ng's course and it seems more theoretical than practical.

In my opinion you need the theoretical before going practical.

Most machine learning is not straight forward but requires quite a lot of planning and experimentation.

Without a good grasp of the theory you are very likely to get skewed or plain wrong results that can cost a fortune.

Of cause, if you are going to do very simple of well developed things its easier, but then there usually exist ready made solutions that does not require much knowledge at all.

So if you think you need to study, start with basic theory and then try out something more practical.

Exactly, pick a theoretical one and implement it your own way.

After that you could look for practical stuff to improve your system