Hahaha, I'm learning Spanish as well, and I'm experiencing the same whenever I watch Univision. They talk very, very fast!
I heard good things about Michael Thomas. Can you expand a little bit more about what you liked about that particular course?
It's far more practical to just watch dvd's with Spanish selected as the audio and English subtitles. Newscasts and/or television programs without subtitles are just too advanced and difficult to understand until you have a real mastery of all the vocabulary, verb tenses, etc. IMO, Spanish is far easier to learn than French ever was. Even after years of French in school, I had a hard time with the conversational aspects. Spanish, on the other hand, can be picked up relatively quickly.
Watching DVD's with the Spanish audio and SPANISH will help immensely. Watching with the English subtitles can become a crutch where you don't immerse yourself in Spanish. Also, when listening to conversation, sometimes you are not sure of the Spanish word the speaker is using and you can sus it out with the subtitles. In the general sense , they French, Spanish, Italian, etc are all romance languages and are about the same. Now if you were comparing Spanish to Japanese...
Without going into too much detail, his courses aim to make language learning fun. I found other courses a chore, but with Michel Thomas he urges you to just relax and leave the responsibility of learning the language with him. I should add though, that there is no reading or writing involved. So although I speak spanish i have little experience in reading or writing ... I aim to remedy that by reading spanish books.
Does anyone have any opinion on these college texts: Sabias que? and Punto y aparte? These are texts that are used at NIU in Chicago for Spanish 101, 102 and 201, 202 level courses.
I used this software to help learn Chinese and found it to be very effective. http://www.shoptransparent.com/