the Price of Spanish Lessons

I took a Spanish class that was 2 hours every week. It cost $150 a month. There was an hour of lessons and an hour of conversational practice.

I had used language tapes to learn Spanish. I'd gotten to the fourth level and definitely felt confident that I'd learned quite a bit. However, I found myself wanting to take classes where I could interact and really test my language skills. The place I found wasn't sure what level of class to place me in. The started me out in the beginning class but after one week I knew it wasn't quite right. They were very good about letting me slip into the next level the next week. That class was a much better fit. The first half of the class we learned from books and lecture. The second half we picked a buddy and conversed with them. I had an interesting experience because the vocabulary I'd learned was different than the rest of the class who'd mostly taken the beginning class offered at that school. This led me to have a much richer experience.

You can certainly learn a lot from language tapes but it doesn't do a lot of good until you can get comfortable having conversations in the language of your choice.