no hablo ingles

So attaining fluency is a lot more difficult than I thought.

But in all seriousness I feel a fair amount of guilt when speaking English. It feels like giving up. It feels like I and whoever I'm speaking English with are failing, that we're cheating ourselves. And we are. I even feel a little guilty writing in English right now, but if I don't write something in a language that I understand I'm going to go crazy.

Another student in the program said she felt her Spanish improved dramatically in the first couple weeks and then suddenly plateaued. And I feel the same way. School's not bad -- I usually catch all of what the teachers say, even if my responses are baby-like. But sometimes Mayte talks, or there's a conversation on TV, or we watch a movie in class or I'm just walking somewhere and I hear Spanish and I think...agh. This is hard. How people learn to speak English is beyond me. At least Spanish only has five vowels and a fairly straightforward grammatical structure compared to English, which is both a blessing and a constant reminder that learning Spanish should not be so hard, that I should be picking up way more than I actually am. Spanish speakers all over the world can pick up English; English speakers all over the world can pick up Spanish. Why is my brain soooooo slowwwww

Smaller groups is the key to speaking Spanish outside of school, I think. When a group of us went to Sevilla this past weekend (more on that soon) (possibly today), we spoke only Spanish for one whole day. And it went really well. After an hour of struggling to get into it, those r's just started rolling naturally and we were actually talking, and not "como se dice"-ing every English word that popped into our heads. I even had this weird thing happen this past week after hearing almost all Spanish all day when I tried to go to sleep that night, where a gobbledygook string of Spanish words kept running through my mind along with an unrelated current of English thoughts. THAT was encouraging, if a little strange. 

I'm glad I'm realizing how tough this is going to be now, as opposed to later (which seems like it would be impossible -- how can you ignore the fact that you don't understand people for 5 months, but I'm good at denying/ignoring things). But that doesn't take away from the fact that sometimes I want to chuck Don Quijote across the room, preferably into Gandalf's litter box. 

I love English for how complex and vast and quirky it is. And I want to love Spanish, too, because in many ways it's so much more direct. It is a decisive language. But right now I just feel boxed out. Gah. Hopefully this changes soon.