Correction

I suppose I should clarify my last post a little. What I should have said is that I can almost always understand most Spaniards so long as it is conversational Spanish, lectures at the Institute are another story. For example, on Saturday Miguel and his friend Adrian were arguing about whether Madrid or Barcelona is better (which is an extremely heated topic here), and I was able to understand not only that they were arguing about which was better, but also the individual points that they were arguing. This is a fairly normal occurrence now.

However, there are still some things that elude me which mainly fall into three main categories which I have organized from least frustrating to most:

1) The Lola*

This category is all the people who have an accent (which is kind of ironic because I have a massive one). Lola is my professor de mates and has one of the most odd/annoying accent/lisps I've ever heard. It's even hard for the other students to understand her sometimes so I have companions in incomprehension, thus this category is the least frustrating.

2) The Javier*

This category is for all that vocabulary that I just don't have. What makes this so frustrating is that when I go home and look up what a word means, it's usually either so painfully obvious that I kick myself for not realizing it or it's impossible to remember. Anyway Javier is my psicologia professor and loves to whip out words that I don't understand, so for that I name this category for him.

3) The Pilar*

While I get better and listening everyday, there are still people who at times just talk too fast. The best example of this is Pilar, profesora de historia. She has a voice like a Sine wave. She'll start off talking in a normal tone (but really fast), progress to shouting (but enunciating her words very clearly), regress back to a normal (but fast) tone, continue to get quieter and quieter until she is almost whispering (but again enunciating very clearly), and finally return to her normal (but fast) tone to complete the cycle. She does this the whole period.

*The people for whom the categories are named are not the only ones I have trouble understanding, merely the best examples of their respective categories.

Anyway, all this comprehension has come as a result of a realization I had the other day about the Spanish language in general. This may sound a tad stupid, but it's the truth so live with it.

The Spanish language is not, in fact, a language but rather more like a mental state. You have to live the language, not just learn it. To be honest this kind of sucks because it means you have to make the decision to not only talk in only Spanish, but also THINK in only Spanish. And that isn't a decision that you can just make and that's that. You have to keep making it every single minute of every single day, constantly forcing yourself to use only Spanish. It's exhausting.

Luckily after a while thinking in only Spanish starts to get a little easier, but at the cost of your English skills. For example, today I was day-dreaming in economy class and tried to translate my thoughts from Spanish into English (which I like to do every once and a while just to make sure that what I am saying makes sense), and I just couldn't do it. It wasn't that I was thinking great abstract thoughts that have no literal translation in English (it was something about tires), I just couldn't make my mind think in English at that point in time. It was a very odd feeling.

Anywho, I should get going.