Consider an intensive course.…  I’m actually a fan of these, but you have to realize at the outset that you’re not going to leave a week-long (or summer-long) class “fluent” in the language.  There are simply practical limitations on how many hours there are in a day, and while concentrated learning times make it possible to get a lot of hours at once, it will still take upwards of years to attain the number of hours of experience in order to become truly proficient in a language.  Additionally, there are “spill-over” concerns when studying intensively like this.  The brain requires some time to soak in the new linguistic information and especially to automatize responses in the new language…  Nonetheless, if you have realistic expectations, these courses ARE a lot of fun, and you can learn a lot in a short time frame…

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It’s true that intensive courses can be intense. It’s a hard fact that most people just really don’t have 8 hours per day, for several weeks to become fluent. Also it’s true that the brain does need to soak in the sounds, and muscle memory for the tongue. The brain has to train the ears to hear new sounds and correlate those sounds with the associated meaning. And you repeat it over and over and over and over again until you can recite it intuitively. Without having to think about it. http://www.learn-podcast-spanish.com has a site that focuses specifically on teaching how to use the most common situations that people run into. Then you learn how to express yourself in that situation using the words a native would use. You will speak like a native and sound like a native. Pretty cool stuff!

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