The First Thing I Learned in Spain

While I came to this realization a few days ago, each day it gets further reinforced in my mind:

I am not fluent in Spanish.

This generally is not a good thing when I'm in a country that speaks Spanish. Sure I speak enough to get by, and can understand a bit more than I can speak. But there's just something that's still uncomfortable about speaking Spanish 24/7, and it's because I really can't do it. My vocabulary isn't as expansive as it needs to be for me to say everything I want to say. My grammar isn't good enough to be clearly specific which kind of past-tense I want to talk about. All this being said: I am not fluent in Spanish.

This made me stop and think about the ever-increasing number of Hispanics in the US. A whole lot of people get all up-in-arms over the fact that they prefer to speak Spanish, and often times can barely speak any English. "This is 'murica! They need to learn English!" Granted this may be true, in that English is the primary language spoken in the US and that it's necessary to be able to communicate with natives in their own language. But to the people who get upset when they hear Hispanics speaking in Spanish to each other at Wal-mart, just shut up. In a country where the family I live with doesn't speak barely a word of English, I relish each moment I go out for coffee with my new American friends and can speak English to them. If my family were to come here, I would not insist they speak Spanish to me lest they offend the Spaniards around me. I have come to have a new level of appreciation for what immigrants go through when they move to a new country that speaks a different language. Again, I think it's important that they do learn English just because in reality it would make their lives in America a whole lot easier (just as learning Spanish will make my life easier here), but I think I'm gonna start cutting them a bit of slack.

I wouldn't want a Spaniard to come up to me and yell in my face that "This is Spain!" and that I need to learn Spanish if I want to live here. I already know I need to do that, but good gravy does my head hurt after a day of speaking and hearing nothing but Spanish.