A couple of years ago, the organisation I work for relocated me 35 miles further up the M1. My daily commute went from 15 minutes each way, to almost an hour in each direction.
I complained bitterly, to anyone who'd listen but, if it hadn't happened, I wouldn't be speaking Spanish now.
My car became my classroom, and I used the extra travelling time to my advantage.
There are a number of audio courses available. Some of you may remember the old Linguaphone cassettes, popular in the 70's and 80's, but most modern courses are in CD format, and easily transferable to mp3.
Obviously I can only comment on the courses I've tried.
I started looking on ebay, and bought a trial CD of the Pimsleur language course. It contained the first 10 half-hour lessons,and cost me around £20. I've since listened to some sample Pimsleur lessons, in other languages, and they all take the same format.
Rather than blowing your mind with grammatical jargon and verb conjugations, they start off with a few basic phrases, and show how you can switch bits around to make new ones. You are speaking from the very first lesson, and the sense of achievement you can get, early on, encourages you to continue. Each lesson begins with you listening to a conversation in Spanish and ends with the same exercise only,hopefully, the second time around, you can actually understand it all.
The lessons are designed to be undertaken one-per-day, and are based on a spaced repetition and recurrence of key phrases, for maximum reinforcement.
It certainly worked for me.
Now the bad news, buying the whole Pimsleur Spanish course, even on ebay, could cost you between £200 and £300. Spread over three proficiency levels, available seperately, there are nearly 50 audio CDs. Note, however, that some of the other Learn Spanish Quickly courses sold on ebay are actually pirated copies of the Pimsleur system in mp3 format, on one CD, typically for around a fiver. The choice is yours. If you'd like to try a free sample lesson, go to http://www.pimsleur.com/Learn-Spanish and click the 'Free Sample Lesson' button.
My second experience of Spanish audio lessons was the offering from Michel Thomas. It struck me, initially, as a little bizarre, learning Spanish from a Frenchman, but he is a very good teacher.
The format is quite different. You effectively become the third student in Michel's class. It works quite well, but some of the mistakes made by the other students can become a little irritating,and there is always the risk that what will stick in your mind are their errors, as opposed to Michel's corrections.
The pace is quite rapid,and you soon move from the simple present to other tenses, and Michel begins to introduce elements of grammar. He avoids using formal terms for the various tenses, explaining, instead, when they should be used, but he does explain the differences between the 'persons' (you, me, he etc).
I found it followed naturally on from the Pimsleur system as it explained WHY I had been doing some of the things the Pimsleur course had introduced me to. Michel places great emphasis on understanding how the language is constructed, encouraging you to think before you speak. The basic and advanced courses, along with a couple of ancillary CDs(around 20 in total) can normally be picked up on ebay for under £50, for the genuine article.
My most recent acquisition was the 11CD 'Learn in your car' course, for under £20 on ebay.
This one is definitely NOT for beginners, as it offers virtually no guidance on learning the language, apart from the little fold-out instruction book, but it does introduce some new vocabulary and phrases not found in the other two courses, although I have used it primarily as a self-testing resource. I can't really recommend this one.
Finally, you may see books with tempting titles like 'Speak Spanish in 8 hours (complete with CD/DVD)'
As you can tell from the number of CDs in the other courses, any course which purports to teach you anything more advanced than 'dos cervezas, por favor' (two beers please) followed by '¿donde está el baño?' (where's the bathroom?) on one or two CDs, is rather over-optimistic!
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