How To Brush Up On Your Spanish Skills After A Lapse

I was recently fortunate enough to score a killer round-trip deal (hotel included) to Puerto Rico over the long Labor Day weekend (), so I’ll be spending 4 days and 4 nights on the island.  Unfortunately, I haven’t really spoken much Spanish since my cruise to Mexico back in January.  Simply put, I’m rusty.  Believe me, it is extremely difficult to maintain foreign language skills when you’re constantly busy.

How I’m Brushing Up

In order to brush up on my Spanish skills and get prepared to hit the ground running when I land in San Juan a month from now, I’m spending about an hour per day studying the language. Since I already know the language and am only brushing up, I can afford to focus my efforts only on the areas I’m most lacking in.  Here’s what I’m doing.

• Watching Spanish films and listening to Spanish radio – The Puerto Rican accent is a difficult one for many learners.  As such, I think my listening skills are probably where I need the most work.  While most of what I’ll hear in films and on the radio isn’t Puerto Rican Spanish, any exposure to an authentic Spanish accent will help tremendously.
• Breaking Out The Old FSI Spanish Course - I’ve decided to break out part two of my FSI Spanish distribution of choice, Barron’s Mastering Spanish series.  I should be able to complete part two of the FSI course in less than a month, which will significantly improve my rusty spontaneous conversational abilities.
• Completing A Spanish Verbs Workbook – I decided to use this as an opportunity to try out The Ultimate Spanish Verb Review and Practice workbook.  It looked promising in the store, sharing many of the characteristics that made Dorothy Richmond’s Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses workbook so effective.  So far, I like it a lot, although I still like Richmond’s workbooks better.  I hope to write a full review of it when I get a chance.  I chose to focus on the verb system because verbs arguably play a more important part in being understood in Spanish than in English.
• Practicing Spanish With Anybody And Everybody – I have a few friends willing to speak Spanish with me on a semi-regular basis.  This will prove to be the most valuable learning tool I have.  If you don’t have any Spanish-speaking friends, you can practice as Mexican restaurants or join a language exchange at your local Latin American Association (most major cities have one).
• Reading El Hobbit/ The Hobbit (Spanish Edition) – Okay, so this is more for pleasure than anything.  I’ve been slowly working my way through the Spanish edition of this Tolkien classic for a little over a month now.  It’s written at a level easy enough for an intermediate student to understand without having to look too many words up in the dictionary.

How do you brush up on your Spanish skills after a long period of not using them?  Is there anything I’ve missed?