I think I've posted this in a couple of threads related to learning Spanish, but I did want to separately plug a Spanish language series that I've just completed for a second time that I thought was pretty amazing. Plus, my plane to SJO doesn't leave for another 12 hours, so I'm pretty bored.
http://www.languagetransfer.org/#!complete-spanish/c1313
The full course is available as YouTube videos or downloadable as MP3. The YouTube videos have no video content, just audio.
Here's the premise:
The entire course is a dialog between an instructor and a student. They focus on teaching spanish with little to no memorization, starting from a collection of cognates between English and Spanish. From the cognates, they begin to add a few more verbs. The instruction is based around learning to think what you are trying to say, break it down into pieces, and use what you know to break it down. Within just a few lessons, the instructor has you saying what look like fairly complex sentences, and breaking via rules that you learn, rather than rules that you memorize. I've been through the full audio course a couple times now, and it has helped immensely with my understanding of Spanish. It's weak on how many Spanish words you actually learn (it relies heavily on the cognates), but this worked very well in conjunction with something like https://www.duolingo.com, which takes a more traditional approach to teaching vocabulary, but did a crappy job of explaining grammar.
My conversational spanish remains poor, simply because I don't practice enough, but I can read reasonably well, and can communicate with anyone who is willing to slow down to my conversation speed.
LanguageTransfer and Duolingo are both completely free (though I have donated to LanguageTransfer simply because I thought what they created was fairly awesome).
You don't need Spanish to be able to monger in CR, but you'll almost certainly have a better experience if you've got some grasp of the language.
