Learning Challenge

Okay, so on July 26th I'm going to Spain. I stopped learning Spanish in year 8 (when I was about 14) so to say my Spanish is rusty would be a bit of an understatement.

Either way, I want to try to learn as much Spanish as possible until then. I am a pretty fast learner (for example I can memorise about 500 kanji a week, and have started learning useful bits of Spanish vocab such as food, objects, places, etc) and not one to take shortcuts usually, but I have plenty free time until then anyway, so I don't mind about learning declensions etc. properly.

So, can anyone reccomend a plan or .. a breakneck 5 week learnfest that I can take? Any resources or paricular textbooks that I can steam through too? The vocab shouldn't be too much of a problem, I just want to make sure I have the grammar under by belt, with all verb forms.

Oh and I'd rather not buy any textbooks, just online resources/pdfs/rapishits if you may. I got a Spanish dictionary and that's all I plan to buy.

GO!

get a teach yourself book, preferably a grammar heavy one but not one that goes into complicated grammar you won't need. i got 'teach yourself german grammar' and that was what i needed. work through that, write down every example and make sure you know the structures.

while you are doing that, make flash cards of every single word you didn't know straight away, and don't go anywhere without them. every time you have a few spare minutes, go through them.
if you make them on scrap paper, then you can just toss them out once you are confident you know the word well enough.

listen to spanish music, and try and learn parts of songs. you don't need to be able to sing, but songs are easy to memorise and you'll then have little packages full of words and probably nice little grammar structures to help you remember.

find a spanish language chan, i know there are a bunch, and browse that. again, write down new words and put them with your flash cards.


you don't need to be fluent in the language to get a lot more out of the trip, and you'll be able to get to the necessary level by then.