I've been trying to learn Spanish for a year now, I'm struggling and I even live in Spain! Here's the list of things I've tried: Rosetta Stone - probably spent

I've been trying to learn Spanish for a year now, I'm struggling and I even live in Spain! Here's the list of things I've tried: Rosetta Stone - probably spent about 2 months working my way through this. Language school - 6 weeks, spent most of it feeling utterly confused and wondering why they were trying to teach me Spanish, using fluent Spanish... Pimsleur - this did really improve my accent and some of the words I'd been using along the way started to become second nature. Still a long way from conversational though, did this for about 4 weeks. Michelle Thomas - by far the best of the bunch for learning grammar, by the end of the basic and advanced courses I pretty much knew the various past/future tenses. Great base, but conversation still isn't happening... Memrise - yeah actually, this really did help my vocabulary, spent about a month using it before christmas, learnt a lot and I can see me using this in the future to expand my vocab. Duolingo - a good base for getting started, not sure how much if sticks though, it has the "lack of context" problem. Private tutor - this is hands down the winner. I've only had a few lessons but I find this really works for me. The big difference is you can have conversations with complete understanding of every word that is said by either of you i.e. if you don't understand a word they say, they can write it down for you, explain what it means (falling back to english if necessary but generally avoided) and then move on. Likewise, if you make an error in something you've said it's corrected on the spot, often going off on tangent to explain some grammar before continuing the conversation. If you want to learn at a consistent pace I think a private tutor is really the only way to go. You're trying learn to converse in a foreign language, until computers can do the conversation bit the other approaches are all going to fall short of the mark. That's not to say they don't have value, and they're obviously far cheaper than a private tutor but without the conversation part they're never going to be enough to get you speaking fluently.