Without further ado, the detritus of my two-year off and on effort to find good ways of learning Spanish.

The Manhattan Times
This is available to few, so I won't linger on it, but it is a newspaper that publishes articles side by side in English and Spanish. So I would read in Spanish and then look at the English version whenever I got stuck. In the process I got to know the machinations of my local Community Board rather well. This was a good way to see how the language was used in real situations, but I found that my retention rate for less common words that I had to look up was not very good, and eventually reached a point of diminishing returns.

Las Puertas Retorcidas (The Twisted Doors) by Kathie Dior
I found this book on Amazon and it seemed like a great concept: use a scary story to give the learner a visceral emotional connection to the language. From personal experience I think this has a lot of potential: some of the words and phrases that stick out the most in my mind from foreign languages are ones that have come up in embarrassing or other emotional situations. Unfortunately, the execution left a lot to be desired. The story was pretty childish and so I didn't experience much emotion at all. The illustrations appeared to be a combination of clip art and rudimentary Photoshop--in one, the villain looked to be dressed like a Pilgrim at the first Thanksgiving, while in another, he looks to have emerged from a medieval dungeon, dressed in rags. Worst of all, the book gave the reader no real way to learn. There were simple lists of vocabulary, basic grammatical lessons, and "tests" in each chapter, but no exercises. All I could do was read the vocabulary, wait several hours, and then test myself on it, and repeat until I got it all right. This got incredibly dull after a while. Some chapters had no grammar instruction at all, and some vocabulary items would be taught repeatedly, while others occurring in the text would not be taught at all. Needless to say I do not recommend this book.

studyspanish.com
I found this site pretty early on and kept going to back to it. Any site that has a link on the front page to "Just show me the free stuff" is okay in my book. They have a ton of material for free as well as a pay area, but more importantly the quality is great. The grammar section has clear and extremely thorough explanations, followed by text and audio exercises that let you hear a native speaker from Spain as well as one from South America. This site might be the best standalone learning tool that I've found so far. The only drawback is that much of my studying time comes during my commute when I have no web access.

501 Spanish Verbs
This is one of three books I found on the street a few years ago. It's a good reference, and also has a very thorough instructional section in the front that goes through all the tenses and their uses.

Breaking out of Beginner's Spanish by Joseph Keenan
This is the kind of book I always like to find about a language. It could never serve as a standalone studying tool. But it's written in a casual, narrative style that's very easy to get through, and offers more information than any textbook about how to use the language in the real world and sound like you know what you're doing. Sections include "10 Ways to Avoid Being Taken for a Gringo", a list of tricky false cognates, a good explanation of verb tenses, how to talk about other people and get the right message across, and of course, obscenity. The only trouble is that sometimes I enjoyed it so much I failed to realize that I wasn't retaining much of the material or incorporating it into my use of the language. But in an immersion situation, where this isn't as much of an issue, "Breaking Out" would certainly be an indispensable resource.

Coffee Break Spanish
I started using this site with Maya fairly late in the process. The Scottish accents of the hosts are as infectious as a Belle and Sebastian vocal, and they vanish impressively when they go into Spanish. But after a little while it was hard to find time to listen to the shows, and I got impatient with the amount of time spent on small talk and other non-instructional material.

In the second part, I'll have an assessment of the Rosetta Stone software.