Over the last five or six years five family members, myself included, have been trying to upgrade their language skills and have tackled French, Spanish, German, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, German, Swedish and Arabic with various degrees of success.
Between us we've used just about every method available ranging from books, the three main language courses available as CDs etc (RosettaStone, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas), evening classes, 1 to1 tuition with native speakers and going to live in the country. We all pretty much agree that, starting from scratch, the most helpful / useful route has been using the Michel Thomas CDs. We've bought some of them and borrowed others from local library's. The introductory course (2 discs) is cheap at around £15 or so. If you get the disks and have any computer skills you can convert them to mp3 for car use.
However, I've tried listening to them in a car while driving and concluded that it doesn't really work. To get the most from them does require total concentration, something you don't have available while driving (not if you want to arrive in one bit anyway). My suggestion would be to listen to music on the commute and put some time aside in the evening when you can block out everything else.
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