Learning Korean

Korean is an extremely difficult language to learn, at least for me. I have no prior experience with any Asian languages, and for that matter Korean is much different than, say, Mandarin Chinese or Japanese. Some of the vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese, while some of the grammatical structure is apparently similar to that of Japanese. I've had a long-standing goal of trying to pick up the native tongue of my students and the people that I see on the streets on a daily basis, but it has been less fruitful than I have hoped. It is nearly impossible for me to take formal classes as a result of my work schedule, and as a result of my lack of formal classes, my ability to learn Korean has been thwarted by a lack of pragmatic usage of the language.
I have a textbook and a dictionary, so I can learn particular words and phrases by reading it (my reading ability is existent, but still quite insufficient), but I when I try to use the phrases I butcher the pronunciation. Nevertheless, I still haven't given up on figuring out how to communicate with the vast majority of people around me that speak little or no English.
I did come across something today that might be promising for increasing my ability to contextually use the language. This company called Pimsleur makes language tapes for several different languages, including Korean. I know, learning languages through tapes is certainly not ideal, but I did the first lesson and it actually seems like it might be a way to increase my unpleasantly-low level speaking skills. I'm going to try to ride out the ten lessons that I have until I have exhausted them, and then maybe I'll have some type of framework for learning more of the language. I hope this is the case because it's really bothering me that I cannot understand people that are trying to speak to me, and that my usable vocabulary is limited to a few phrases that I find myself repeating constantly.