Spanish is the semi-ubiquitous language of the U.S. Dialects and accents are quite divergent, and regionalism is strong. Not to mention, the language tends to be spoken very quickly. Nevertheless, Mexico is right under our American border and it has the largest population of Spanish speakers in the world, so it's not so bad to learn and there are lots of good books available.
South America is quite fun to vacation in and most of the countries officially speak Spanish...or Portuguese, which is like Spanish...but easier grammatically and harder phonetically. Different parts of the Amazon use that and Spanish, sometimes mixing them both into riverense portunhol/portuniol, with perhaps a few hundred Native languages like Guarani. Amazonian Portuguese aka Caipira tends to also have an unusual minimal inflection and an /r/ much like American English, making it perhaps the easiest language to learn for American English speakers; Brazilian already generally uses a much reduced conjugation. Argentinian Spanish is very different phonetically with a very strong influence from an Italian dialect substrate due to immigration. Syllable final r-dropping or substitution with /h/ is prevalent for instance, and reminds me of British versus American English.
Madrigal's Magic Key is a fantastic resource and don't be put off by its size. The method it uses requires you to chunk together sentences and is very empowering. You will also immediately be using words that Spanish shares with English to make them, and it's got cute little drawings by Andy Warhol. There is a very similar course online that reminds me of by Marcus Santamaria. It has more words of encouragement than Madrigal's and is spread out over a much larger bit of text, so I definitely think it would be useful if someone needs that kind of intensive format. It also mostly covers the present tense for practical needs while Madrigal's jumps in at the past tense because it's good for telling stories and is more regular than the present tense (not that Spanish is that irregular compared to most other languages.)
There's a Madrigal's Magic Key for French that comes highly recommended but for some inexplicable reason it's out of print and costs as much as college course in basic French (depending on availability), tho some would argue it's worth your money. Theres also a German version.
If you just want a taste of Spanish there's See It & Say It In Spanish which is a bit like Rosetta Stone...except it came before Rosetta Stone. It also costs $7 not $500. And it's illustrated by Andy Warhol--crazy huh? There is a version of this for French that comes highly recommended because it's the only book I know of that shows the obligatory liaisons, which is the French word for the phenomenon of actually pronouncing the end of a word in French (you'd be surprised, it doesn't happen that often.) Not to mention there's a basic book by Madrigal for Italian, German and Portugese.
Another good book, but it can be very imposing, is Spanish for Reading. This is also available for French, but I think it works well with Spanish because Spanish orthography is easy to sound out as you go (more so than French's at least.) French for Reading is likewise quite good but out of print (I recommend the version with the eye on the cover, it's more recent.)
If you need audio to go with these there are a ton of Memrise courses. These are good because of the crowd-sourced mnemonics that people think up for them too, and there are pictures too! And you can make your own courses and have your own forums! It's like a better Rosetta Stone for free. But I'll leave some more for another post.
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