I am not impressed with Teach Yourself Spanish. I have a number of criticisms. First, there is the tedious intro on the disc. Second, there is basically more English (British English) on the discs than Spanish. Third, there is no real practice built into the design of the audio portion. You get to hear a quick dialogue. If you want to hear it again you can "go back and listen again," but this impractical with a CD (and a cassette, too); practice should be built into the plan without requiring constant fiddling with controls. One could search for the spot where the dialogue begins, but it would be hard to find that spot, and one might end up in the middle of the dialogue. Then one's ear is immediately exposed to English again. There are no "spaces" for you to repeat. There is no breakdown of the dialogue so that you can start to understand the bits and pieces. There is no pattern buildup or practice. In short, I see little pedagogical methodology behind this course.
I also found it irritating that I was unable to ascertain from the Amazon listing whether the Teach Yourself series edition for Latin American Spanish had a CD portion, but it appears that it does not, so I ordered the "regular" Spanish course.
For the aural portion of learning a new lanaguage, I find the Pimsleur method to be much more effective. Yes, they go slowly, because a lot of practice and repetition is built into the design. You will learn the phrases if you just do the tapes and repeat as directed. For quick fixes and profitable use of car or housework time--say, on numbers, or food, or telling time, or restaurant expressions--I recommend the "Learn in Your Car" series put out by Penton OVerseas Inc. The units are short and to the point. The packaging is compact. Starting about three weeks before going to a Spanish-speaking country for the first time, and knowing not a word of the language, I listened to the half-hour Pimsleur lessons up to the intermediate level while doing the dishes; on this basis and also the "Learn in YOur Car" CDs plus my ever-handy pocket dictionary when I was in Costa Rica, I was able to make my way, get directions, buy tickets, etc. And I encountered very few people, say, in the bus stations or on the street, who spoke a word of English.
For serious self-teaching, I believe that one really needs a school course with a serious language-lab portion, which contains all the pattern drills etc that one needs in order to get enough practice. The rule of thumb is that one must hear a new word, phrase, or gramamatical construction 50 times and/or use it at least 10 times in order to learn it. These language lab components seem to be generally unavailable to the general public, which is stuck wtih lightweight audio components that cannot really get you much past the travellers'-phrase level.
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