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I've decided to take Spanish101 next semester. Unlike when I was taking French, I genuinely want to learn Spanish and be able to communicate in it. I'd love to hear how you went about getting somewhat fluent in a foreign language.
I learned so much in four months at that school that I was ahead of most Junior spanish majors when I got back. (I was also highly motivated to learn the language, and lived with a Spanish family. It's definitely possible to go to any language school and not learn a lot if you don't make the effort.)
I went back there a couple years later and did another semester... but at this point I have full command of the grammar, and just need to work on vocabulary. For that, all you need is some spanish speakers to talk to.
Having studied a number of languages, I've come to believe that being forced to speak and write at the outer limit of your ability is the most effective way to learn a foreign language (listening and reading will come effortlessly as a side effect). However this is somewhat expensive, emotionally tiring (adults aren't used to the experience of constant failure and correction), and it can be hard to find someone who will really pounce on every mistake.
I've found intensive immersion programs with small classes to be a good second-best, especially at the beginner level where progress is very rapid and you have a chance to internalize proper phonetics and grammar.
A possibly useful image: you have about ten thousand wrong sentences you have to get out of you before you are speaking the language well, so you need to find someone who will help you get them out of your system as efficiently as possible.
The best way is complete immersion with real Spanish speakers. It also requires good social skills to connect with those people in a way that actually changes the way you speak and think to sound more natural in that language. People don't follow text-book rules in their own language.
The coursework system of language instruction is broken, because it measures your ability to pass a course, and this has little connection to really knowing a language.
I don't know what part of the country you're in (or even if you're in the US), but if you can find a way to start buying Spanish newspapers and watching Spanish television, you'll be in much better shape than if you just tried structured education.
I then forgot about French until I was in my early 20s. I met my wife. She's French. I figured I'd better make an effort to speak French.
Having someone to talk to meant I could make all sorts of errors and get corrected. But she was the wrong person to tell me about French grammar. I tried taking classes in a local college but they were awful. Eventually I paid a Swiss woman to teach me French grammar. Very quickly I realized that the rules of French drilled into me at school were lurking in my head and that all that rote learning was very, very useful. I took lessons for about 6 months for two hours once a week.
Now I speak French fluently.
A class can only take you so far. I took four years of Spanish when I was in school, and then spent 2 months in an intensive Spanish course ( several hours a day, every day ). I still felt very much the same as you do now. Then I went to a place where I lived, worked, and socialized with native Spanish speakers from several different countries - within 6 months, people I spoke to on the phone thought I was born and r…
I also lived in Spain, but never became fluent in the language because I spoke English to everyone. Immerse yourself in the language, speak to natives all the time and you'll be fluent in 6 months.
http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html
has some detailed suggestions. Read as much as you can in Spanish, and listen to as much Spanish as you can at every opportunity, and you will improve in Spanish.
I majored in Chinese in university, back when following my advice above was hard for that language in my town, and then lived overseas in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. Listening to the radio helped a LOT when I first arrived in country.