Learning By Your Own
First, you have to option to learn the Spanish by going online and doing it by yourself. For most people, this will be almost an impossible task because you should first search for the lessons, then you have to order them in a meaningful way and after all this said and done you will have a pile of super boring documents that you will have to study in order to make some progress. Worst of all, those documents will have many repeated information on them that will make you lose hundreds of hours and if you put some value to your time, you will agree with me that this option is the most stressful and costly of all and should be only be the way of the super poor.
Taking An Online Course
This is my preferred way, but not always you will find good options to choose. One of the most known options is Rosetta Stone and the program is good, but it is ultra-boring, very expensive and many students just abandon the course because of this. You will find other options as "Learning Spanish Like Crazy" and it is also good, but this is not serious program to learn Spanish, just an option to learn a very basic Spanish to travel and be able to somewhat defend yourself. The best option is select Rocket Spanish as your learning course. The real advantage of a very well structured course is that you will not waste hundreds of hours going through the same lessons. You will progress with the language at your own pace and you won't have pressures to keep up with teachers. The only disadvantage is that you should have discipline to commit hours to your learning process in other to get where you want to be and work hard by your own toward your goal.
Taking A Course In A Spanish Speaking Country
This is the most attractive option for the wealthy, because you could visit beautiful places while learning the Spanish language from the source. Consider that Spanish is talked different in different countries and there are some words that mean different things. One example of this is the slang "Pendejo". In a country like Peru, this refer to a person that is smart and use his intelligence in a wrong way, taking advantage of others, but in México the same word means that this person is stupid in a way that other take advantage over him (in Peru, you will call this person: "Cojudo" -- also a slang --).
Particularly, if you want to learn Spanish in Peru, you have really two choices: Learn it in the capital of Peru which is Lima or learn it in Cusco, which is the most visited city of Peru by foreigner, because of Machu Picchu (shown in the picture above). Machu Picchu is extremely beautiful and is a very strong reason to select this location to learn the Spanish language and because of all the US visitors, you will find that the level of English is strong and you will be very comfortable selecting some reputable place to learn the language.
Cons
Machu Picchu is located very high, so you have to be cautious with a syndrome called "Soroche" or also called "altitude disease". I saw some people having nausea, having nose bleeding at their first day at Cusco, so if you don't feel good in the altitude, you better select Lima as you place to learn Spanish. People in Lima are very helpful and you will be very comfortable if you select a good Hotel in a good place like: "Miraflores", "San Isidro", "La Molina" or "Santiago De Surco". All these are very good places that will make you feel like home.
