De veras. Born bilingual, I taught English as a Second Language for many years. Language acquisition begins prior to birth and continues until about pre-teen years. Believe it or not you learned over 80% of the english you now possess prior to the age of 12. During this time, the brain is actually hard wiring itself for language. The more a child is exposed to spoken language, the more neural pathways are created. At a certain point in development this process stops. This is why a person may be exposed to a foreign language as a young child and speak it fairly fluently, forget it as he gets older, and then later in life find himself in a situation where he needs to use the language and be surprised how quickly it comes back. That's because those neural pathways are still in there, waiting. Vocabulary may be lacking, but the basic structure of the language will come back fairly fast as well as pronunciation. In college I had a girlfriend who had lived as a toddler in the Phillipines and according to her mother had spoken spanish and english equally well. We went to spend the summer in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. She enrolled in a language class at the local college and was essentially fluent by the end of the summer. She did not remember speaking spanish as a child.
Unfortunately, learning language as an older person is much harder. My kindergarten thru 3rd grade kids from Mexico and central America would pick up english incredibly fast, but the 7th and 8th graders who came in from southern Mexico and had no exposure to english had a terrible time. Basically, anyone adolescent or older has to rely on memory rather than the childhood language acquisition facilities of the immature brain. You gotta use it, all the time in order to get that vocabulary and structure into long term memory. Be immersed. Listening to tapes may work for the exceptional individual but not for most. A three or 4 month stay in an immersion program in Mexico, Central America, France or Spain would be the hot ticket. The languages do not directly translate. Forget college courses. They are not geared towards conversation and are about as useless as high school courses. You didn't learn english by filling in correctly conjugated verbs in blanks on a workbook page. Whatever you can do that most closely imitates immersion will get you there the fastest. There is a system of books and if I remember correctly tapes produced by an author named Margarita Madrigal. I don't know if they're still in production but they are geared towards conversation and break the language down into pretty simple systems that will give you a jump start. You might want to look them up. I have copies of and have used Rosetta Stone english version with older spanish speakers and it has not proven worth the money. If you have spanish speaking friends, have them speak spanish to you all the time WITHOUT translation. YOU figure out what they're saying. Use context clues. Watch the novelas on Telemundo or Univision, NOT sports. Watch the news on those same networks. Music and songs can wait. Song lyrics are highly idiomatic, often slang and will only confuse you at the outset. There's no magic bullet that will give you another language, you've got to combine as many sources as you can and immerse yourself as often as you can over a fairly long time if you can't arrange some kind of intensive immersion in a foreign country. Buena suerte!

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