Well, I definitely need to brush up on my Spanish-- I think it would really really help my social work resume. I had six years in high school and college and probably couldn’t put a sentence together now. Sad really, but I think I could get it back up to speed. Anyway, there seem to be a lot of lessons online, many of which claim to be free, but it’s very hard to tell which ones are any good. Does anyone know of some good ones? Downloadable mp3s would be nice. Thanks so much!
www.spanishpod.com is a fantastic, downloadable podcast that I cannot recommend highly enough. As someone who’s always been an avid fan of learning languages both on my own and through formal instruction I fell in love with www.chinesepod.com and so was of course curious to see how their www.spanishpod.com measured up to my expectations when it recently came out. Having already learned the bulk of my Spanish 15 years ago, I can say that I’m confident in their assessments of level and aptitude (basic, intermediate, etc.) and find the teaching style to be engaging and actually a bit addictive. Give it a shot - it’s free to check out the basic lessons and doesn’t cost much to get all the extra stuff like shows hosted by mixes of native speakers and learners who discuss things in English, Spanish and sometimes both, in a way that really makes the learning enjoyable.
There are also offshoot projects like italianpod and frenchpod but I have no experience with those.