Myths about learning Spanish: Vocabulary and phrase memorization should be a major part of learning to speak basic Spanish

With so many choices about which Spanish language course is best, how are you supposed to know which one to invest in? Many of the courses on the market today are databases of vocabulary that have been programmed to aid in word/phrase memorization, not language mastery. 

Instead of teaching you how to speak, these courses will overwhelm you with lists of vocabulary words and common phrases, encouraging you to spend time memorizing them. For example, they'll teach you that Dònde estå el baño?' means Where is the bathroom?, but they don't teach you WHY it means Where is the bathroom? And what if you need to say Where are my friends? or Where is the bus station? Wouldn't it be much more effective to approach the "Where is..." topic by teaching how to ask about the location of things? Instead of that approach, unfortunately many courses are happy putting one single arbitrary phrase in front of the student and asking the student to memorize it?

But they never actually present the Spanish language in an understandable and digestible way. I've taught Spanish for years and one of the first lessons I learned when teaching was the students need to understand language structure early. Unless students have a grasp of how communication is structured in the beginning, they will be lost. It would be like someone asking you to build a house, but not mentioning the order and organization required to complete the job (i.e. first dig a hole, then lay the foundation, next frame the house, etc). I hear similar complaints over and over again from my students who have used other courses. This is one of the worst ways to learn a language, especially Spanish.