Study Spanish using an audio course

One popular area for learning Spanish is the home study market. Originally these were distributed on cassette tape from bookshops or mail order and later as compact disk became a popular format, so the language courses changed to CD too. And now with the advent of fast Internet connections and the popularity of portable music players such as the Pod downloadable Spanish courses are starting to grasp a foothold in the teach-yourself market and are surely destined to take a bigger market share over the course of the next couple of years. One thing to remember if you already have a Spanish course on CD is that you don't have to go and buy it, or another course, all over again just to listen to it on your iPod. You can use iTunes or any other free music utility to convert the audio from your CD course to enable you to upload it to your music player. That way you can take your Spanish course with you absolutely everywhere your iPod goes! This great flexibility means you really have no excuse not to study Spanish, or any other language. You can listen in the car; on the train; or in your lunch break at work. While listening to Spanish will help you improve your listening skills, you really do need to practice speaking Spanish to help you with your conversational Spanish. While you could try it on the train I'm not sure that I'd advise it, but if you practice your conversational skills for just 10 or 15 minutes every day you will see an improvement. The real key here is regular practice to keep reinforcing the information that your brain absorbs. Although teaching yourself Spanish is no substitute for actually living in a Spanish speaking country and forcing yourself to use the language in your everyday life, you will gain some benefit all the same.