Ah, Spanish ended up as my major too! In my last year of undergrad, I also started learning Catalan, and my honours thesis was on a book in Catalan (although I certainly read a lot of journal articles in Spanish for research). Sadly my Catalan rusted much worse than my Spanish did, because for all you don't often come across much Spanish in Australia, Catalan is on another level. I've also dabbled in Portuguese, Italian, French, Esperanto and Indonesian… but if I don't keep it up anything I remember fades away fast. ASL sounds like a cool language to learn.
I've been reading Harry Potter in Spanish (getting close to the end of the fifth one!) and I do watch YouTube videos (including news) without subtitles, haha. Some accents are definitely much easier to understand for me than others, though. The speaking practice is really the tricky part – 99% of the practice I get is me speaking to my cat! When I've travelled in Spanish-speaking countries (although the most recent time is five years ago now, eek) I was able to have conversations, although my vocabulary was seriously lacking. I'm sure I've improved a lot since then, but it's still true that my passive vocabulary is much bigger than my active one. I can read Harry Potter no problem (hardly any words I can't guess from context) but if I carry on an internal monologue in Spanish I get lots of blanks. Maybe I should be more diligent about noting those blanks and actually looking them up in SpanishDict.
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Date: 2019-11-12 11:55 am (UTC)I've been reading Harry Potter in Spanish (getting close to the end of the fifth one!) and I do watch YouTube videos (including news) without subtitles, haha. Some accents are definitely much easier to understand for me than others, though. The speaking practice is really the tricky part – 99% of the practice I get is me speaking to my cat! When I've travelled in Spanish-speaking countries (although the most recent time is five years ago now, eek) I was able to have conversations, although my vocabulary was seriously lacking. I'm sure I've improved a lot since then, but it's still true that my passive vocabulary is much bigger than my active one. I can read Harry Potter no problem (hardly any words I can't guess from context) but if I carry on an internal monologue in Spanish I get lots of blanks. Maybe I should be more diligent about noting those blanks and actually looking them up in SpanishDict.