One popular area for learning Spanish is the home study market. Originally these were distributed on cassette tape from bookshops or mail order and later as compact disk became a popular format, so the language courses changed to CD too. And now with the advent of fast Internet connections and the popularity of portable music players such as the Pod downloadable Spanish courses are starting to grasp a foothold in the teach-yourself market and are surely destined to take a bigger market share over the course of the next couple of years.

But you don't need to buy a new downloadable Spanish course if you already have one on CD. You can use iTunes or another program to convert the audio so that you can play it on your portable music player. This may be MP3 or another format – it really doesn't matter which it is as long as your music player can play it – just upload it to your device and you can carry your language course wherever you go.

That brings about great flexibility and you'll be able to follow your course on the train or in the car. You can even take it to work so that you can study Spanish during your lunch break.

While listening to Spanish will help you improve your listening skills, you really do need to practice speaking Spanish to help you with your conversational Spanish. While you could try it on the train I'm not sure that I'd advise it, but if you practice your conversational skills for just 10 or 15 minutes every day you will see an improvement. The real key here is regular practice to keep reinforcing the information that your brain absorbs. Although teaching yourself Spanish is no substitute for actually living in a Spanish speaking country and forcing yourself to use the language in your everyday life, you will gain some benefit all the same.