Well, here am in Spain, where they, ah, speak Spanish. Time to step up and deal with it.
My ability in Spanish is not bad, all things considered. To recap what I talked about in this post from last February, I had four years of Spanish instruction in junior high and high school, ending with tenth grade. I loved it and was very good at it, but you don’t get fluency from that level of instruction, unless you are surrounded by speakers of the language, which I was not.
I didn’t get any more Spanish instruction until I spent a month at a language school in Querétaro, Mexico, in my mid-forties. I had five hours of one-to-one classes daily, plus “cultural activities,” which could mean seeing a museum, learning to cook chiles rellenos, or going to the cantina for a paloma. While I learned a great deal in that month, fluency continued to elude me.