I agree with you about music too. It has been one of the ways I’ve maintained my Portuguese since I left Brazil. Music has the added benefit of being something that you naturally want to memorize the lyrics to (it helps if you actually look the lyrics up), then you have a database inside your head of memorized phrases that you can relate back to if you want to get into learning the specifics of grammar usage.

The best thing I did though, and the real way I learned Spanish before I was living in Spanish speaking countries, was to find people in my community who spoke Spanish. I spent a year solid hanging out with a group of Mexican friends who spoke little to no English, starting out with a lot of hand gestures and periods where I didn’t really have a clue what was going on, but after a while I got so that I could speak more and more. Regardless of what country, if you live in a large city, you can probably find a community of Spanish speakers, it’s just a matter of prioritizing.

I’m a huge proponent of always carrying around a little notebook too. Whenever they would say something that I felt was useful, or when I needed a word that I didn’t know, I would ask them and then write it down in my notebook. If I were to point to one thing, I would say that this was probably the most important language learning tool I had.

Noah Goodman
The Global Language Project
http://www.facebook.com/globallanguageproject