Online Spanish courses

Continuing our look at free online language courses, this week we're going to look at Spanish, which is spoken not only in Spain, but across vast tracts of Central and South America. The total number of speakers worldwide is estimated to be between 400-500 million.

There's plenty of free Spanish courses available on the web, but unfortunately, few of them really make the cut. Most of what I could find were riddled with bad web design, very little content, and extremely hard to follow.

Possibly the best grammar lessons to be found were at 123teachme.com - beginner and intermediate, and MIT has some very comprehensive courses in their OpenCourseware section: Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Spanish 3 and Spanish 4.

Finally, top marks again to the BBC for their multimedia course, one of the better interactive courses available.