Check out the audio cd's by michel thomas. I was trying to learn french a few years ago and this was the best learning aid I found. It's entirely conversatinal - listen and speak along; you never have to write stuff down or try to memorise things.
The best thing, imo, about this system is that you can forget about it for a month and then, when you try it again, you get back into it in no time. It definitely seems to have the edge over other systems I've tried in getting things into your permanent and automatic memory.
what were your end results for the amount of time you invested? are you conversational? fluent? can you read news articles or fairy tales (many languages are quite different when casually spoken versus formally written....usually there are more tenses for verb past-tense conjugations)
(what does "conversational" even mean? that you've memorized common stranger-conversations, or that you know how to conjugate all present tense verb forms?)
The best thing, imo, about this system is that you can forget about it for a month and then, when you try it again, you get back into it in no time. It definitely seems to have the edge over other systems I've tried in getting things into your permanent and automatic memory.