Five years. Five freaking years. That’s a quarter of my life! You’d think my Castellano would be a little better than it is….. But no. I’m stuck here listening to people speak words that I can’t understand….. It’s frustrating. Plus, if I want to speak, the entire conversation has to stop while they wait for me to figure out what words I need and how to conjugate those damn verbs…. And then if I’ve chosen the wrong word or conjugation the conversation is stalled even longer while they figure out what I’m trying to say.

I feel as if I go around playing monkey-see-monkey-do to have even a chance of figuring out what’s going on. There are concepts and concrete objects that we never covered in any of my Spanish classes, and even more frustratingly, there are those that we have covered, but have simply slipped my mind. The 6-year-old Oihan speaks two languages fluently… Oh my jealousy! I’m like a 3-year-old in a 20-year-old’s body when it comes to communicating.

I suppose I should look on the bright side though…. if I feel like saying or writing something that nobody in the house will understand very well, all I have to do is use my English. Which is kind of cool.