Spanglish...

So I have to say... when I thought of coming to Chile, learning Spanish beforehand never really seriously crossed my mind. I mean, yeah I did some self-tutoring via the internet and even went on a weekend cramming course.. but I kinda just thought I'd figure it out once I got here... hahaha.

Now, 4 months in, I kinda expected to be able to communicate in Spanish pretty well by now... well, I can communicate it's true... and a lot of the time I think I'm actually doing OK, though my Spanish abilities are definitely very temperamental.
However, the bigger problem I've encountered over the past few weeks, is that I now can't speak English either. So basically - I'm stuck in some kind of limbo where I can't speak Spanish, or English. hmmm...

This fact didn't really strike me until Sunday afternoon, lying on top of a hill in the middle of the Araucanian countryside with some friends - it was boiling hot and absolutely stunning, you could see for miles into the surrounding hills, and we were playing eye spy (just cause, why not!). We played it first in Spanish, which was OK, though we didn't know the names of some of the things we were seeing, we could get most of them. After, we decided to try it in English. At this point, I realised... I couldn't think of the names of anything I could see in English either! Slightly less good.

I have to say - when you think about living and learning another language, I didn't expect it to be like this. You see people translating from one language to another almost instantaneously all over the TV and they make it look so easy - it's really not. All languages are the same, words translate directly... but then phrases and sentences don't, and that's whats the hardest. So quite often, you can form an English sentence in your mind, translate it perfectly (or so you think) into Spanish and they just look at you like 'what the hell?'. I think this is what's muddling my brain the most, and so I end up thinking the wrong way round... trying to put adjectives after the noun when I'm speaking English or saying things like 'the house of Audrey' (my partner especially has got into saying things like this, much to my amusement). Its also weird how just random words come to you in Spanish when writing or talking in English, and it takes that much longer to think of the English one!

It's a very strange feeling and very very frustrating on the most part. However, I'm gonna take this as a good sign, and though this stage is possibly even harder to when we first arrived and knew nothing (I mean, at least I knew I knew nothing and so did everyone else!), hopefully it means that Spanish is slowly starting to take root and that maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to communicate fluently after a few more months.

I don't even know if this ramble makes any sense - I'll blame it on my scrambled brain if it doesn't. I do think Spanglish should be an official language though, as if it was - I reckon I'm fluent in that one :)