[tkflames]

I am learning Spanish at the moment. Based on my experience to date (3 months) I would recommend:

The Michael Thomas method first. This is a very valuable tool for being able to say a lot of important things very quickly. Even if you have never practiced the language before, you can probably start at the intermediate level. It is important to repeat the cd's/lessons after a week or so to make sure you were able to retain most of it. The biggest disadvantage to this method (I found), is that it gives you very little in the way of vocabulary. You do get a lot of really good information on how to translate a lot of words from English to Spanish and it gives you all of the ground rules for verb conjugation which is basically the fundamental building block to saying and understanding sentences. (He was able to teach me about Spanish, in about 7 hours, what middle/high school French could not in 6 years).

Rosetta Stone: I have found this to be a helpful follow up to the Michel Thomas method. I find Rosetta stone is very focused on Vocabulary and helps you get a thorough understanding of the language. However, it takes a lot of effort to get to the point where you are saying meaningful sentences. Also, by having taken the Michel Thomas method first, I have found that when I do learn a complete sentence in Rosetta stone, I can easily conjugate this for: past tense, present tense, -ing tense, would do tense, will do tense, future tense, going to tense...etc.