USDA Grad School Spanish classes?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hi, all. I’m seriously considering learning Spanish - it’s a very useful skill for a public-interest lawyer to have. I have no Spanish experience whatsoever, so I’ll have to start off with an introductory course.

Have any Dopers taken the USDA Grad School’s intensive introductory course? http://www.graduateschool.edu/course_details.php?cid=SPAN2205E If so, what was your opinion of it?

Does anyone have any recommendations for other introductory Spanish courses in the DC/Northern Virginia area?

2

I took some USDA Russian language classes when I lived in DC. I thought it was pretty good. The instructors generally knew what they were talking about. Gave me a good head start before I moved to Russia.

The price is right but as I recall the books were not cheap. They were college textbooks.

If I had stayed in DC longer, my friend and I were going to take Lithuanian so that we could essentially speak in a code that no one would understand, other than the odd Lithuanian.