I'm a big fan of the ASSIMIL method. You get a tiny textbook with about 100 short stories in both the language you learn and your own (and just enough grammar to get the important points across). You start by reading and understanding the stories. After about 50 lessons, you start a 'second wave', where you translate the same stories from your language into the target language. The books use a lot of spoken expressions. I believe that would be the book "ASSIMIL - German without toil" for you then. Disclaimer: I haven't looked into that one, obviously. :)