If you work in the service industry, plan on traveling or are just trying to enrich yourself, a second language is a good way to improve yourself. The economy being what it is, adding another tuition bill to your monthly commitments may not be such a great idea. However, finding the best program to learn Spanish is both inexpensive and just as effective.
While there are tons of programs out on the market, make sure you choose one of the ones that have proven to be effective for users time and time again. Programs like Rocket Spanish continue to gain popularity as they can literally teach you a new language in less than a month.
One of the biggest obstacles that people have when they are learning a new language is the ability to accept the language in a child like manner. What they fail to realize is that they are literally starting out as if they were a young child and this is necessary to begin to learn the language.
The reason you have to start out like this is because you have to learn how to think in the language that you are learning. One of the worst mistakes that you can make is in trying to hear something, translate it to English, answer in your head in English and then translate back to Spanish before you speak. You have to think the language in order to speak it properly.
Once you retrain your brain to think in Spanish, the rest is a piece of cake. You will begin to pick up the language much quicker and being an adult, you will already be familiar with rules of grammar, etc… At that point, it is just a matter of transferring them over to the new language and then you are ready to go. In most cases, you can have conversational Spanish in less than a month.