Spanglish

I realized yesterday evening and today that I've started communicating in a weird Spanish-English hybrid.  I now know enough Spanish that I can understand a lot of things and express myself more or less if the listener is patient.  But I don't know enough vocabulary to express myself all the time.  For instance, one of the administrative assistants at work was talking to me today - she is pregnant and I wanted to ask her how she was feeling and how far along she was.  While I know the word for pregnant, I don't really know the word for pregnancy, let alone all the other words that go with that.

My Spanish friend took me out for coffee with a few of her friends yesterday. They all spoke very quickly and with a lot of slang, so I had a rough time understanding specifics of what was going on.  I got the general idea even though we were in a loud cafe.  I realized that I was relying way more on contextual cues than I normally might have to.  Because it's not guaranteed I'll understand every word to begin with, I have to really pay attention for those I do understand.  It's a sort of interesting speech perception problem, actually, how the cues I'm relying on are changing over time.  What I really need to do is just spend more time with Spaniards so I understand more of the slang and vocabulary.  Vocabulary is my real downfall in Spanish.  The real problem is that I've always understood grammar, so I can put together a complex sentence, which makes people think I understand and know more than I do.  Still, I've only been here for 6 weeks - my Spanish has nowhere to go but up.

In bug related news, I got a plug in repellent thing that keeps away mosquitos and tiger mosquitos (apparently the bugs that keep attacking me).  Hopefully it will work. I'm also considering getting a mosquito net for over my door, so I can still get fresh air, but not bugs.  Or, I can always suggest what Pete told me to tell the people here:  Invent screens.