u/Trick-Swordfish-263

I just got back from a couple weeks of vacation in Mexico with my wife. We spent time on the beach on Isla Mujeres, and explored Yucatan. Because we were flying out of Cancun, we spent our last day there.

One really surprising discovery on this trip was how much fun I had speaking Spanish even in touristy areas like Isla Mujeres and Cancun! As it turns out, I now have something in common with the bilingual people who work in places like these, and I had a blast communicating with them in a somewhat chaotic mix of Spanish and English.

We were usually greeted with "hola" or "buenos días", and I would respond and begin the interaction in Spanish, so people tended to get a sense of my Spanish from the start. A lot of folks were visibly relieved to be able to fall back to Spanish with me when things got complicated. Even people with great English switched to Spanish sometimes for convenience. A server at breakfast one day was speaking very fluent English with my wife, but while taking her coffee order, she turned to me and asked "¿Cómo se dice «deslactosada» en inglés?"

Others were eager to practice their English and struggled through rough patches despite clearly realizing I could understand them in Spanish. (One cheerfully tenacious hotel clerk couldn't remember how to say "forty-five" and tried valiantly to express the idea some other way before finally giving up and saying it in Spanish.) I could relate, and I tried to use English with them whenever possible. Similarly, people with a near-native command of English would sometimes kindly prefer Spanish with me anyway so that I could practice. With others, our abilities in each other's native languages would turn out to be similar and we'd end up settling on pure Spanglish, switching languages at the slightest provocation.

But it wasn't all Spanglish in touristy areas on this trip. We spent time in Valladolid and Mérida, where I had lots of chances to get myself into situations where Spanish was a necessity. We did a day trip to Sisal, a little beach town on the gulf coast, and I didn't hear a word of English all day from anyone except my wife. I was super happy with how all of that went. I had no difficulty doing everything in Spanish, including renting a car, getting gas, and asking whether our room was available for an extra night when we had a change of plans. I had a great time making small talk, and chatted with a bunch of people on a variety of topics.

I also spent a lot of time on the beach and on the train reading Isabel Allende. It's La ciudad de las bestias, meant for adolescent readers, but still, reading Allende in the original Spanish was one of my goals when I started DS, and here I am! I'm having an easy time with this one and I suspect I don't really need to stick to YA fiction. 1,500 hours is feeling pretty great.

I spent the past week in CDMX with my wife. I was last there almost a year ago at 820 hours (see my post about that trip). I also had 12 hours of speaking practice then, vs. 114 now. What a difference that all made!

I feel like I'm in the midst of crossing a border between being a Spanish learner, and being a basically competent Spanish speaker who still has a lot of areas to improve. Maybe that seems like a small difference, but it feels huge to me!

While I still make a ton of mistakes, I can just talk to people about whatever now, without thinking about how to say things before I speak. I'm getting much more fluid and would no longer describe my speech as halting, except maybe on a bad day. I understand around 90% of what people say, and when I miss something it's almost always clear to me that it's just a word or expression that I don't know yet (except in noisy environments, where I still have more trouble catching things than I do in English).

I'm also losing the sensation that native speakers talk fast. Last time, I remember there were a bunch of standard restaurant interactions that would throw me because things that people say 100 times a day come out pretty fast. That problem is pretty much gone unless there's a lot of noise.

Some things I was able to do on this trip:

- Asked an uber driver if he liked his BYD (reliable and great for taxi work, apparently), talked with him about places he's visited in the US, and joked back and forth about the weather and the traffic.

- I needed to overnight some documents to the US, so I went to a copy shop to have them printed, and got directions to a nearby DHL. Handled it all in Spanish, no difficulties. I'm definitely feeling up to this part of the level 6 description: "you can get by at the bank, at the hospital, at the post office, or looking for an apartment to rent".

- At a restaurant, we unknowingly ordered breakfast-menu items at lunchtime and they checked but didn't have them anymore. When I was in Guanajuato ~300 hours ago I could have figured out what was going on and navigated the situation with some effort, but this time I understood everything easily and just talked with the waiter about it, no big deal.

- At an interesting cafe (Buna; highly recommended if you're into good coffee) I decided while ordering to buy a bag of coffee beans and asked which they recommended I try first. They asked if it was for pour-over or espresso, inquired about my preferences and described a couple choices, I picked one, they checked to make sure I wanted whole bean, etc. Totally doable.

I feel like I'm making myself sound too capable because I'm excited about my progress, so just to keep expectations realistic: at passport control, I started in Spanish and we continued that way until I failed to understand the question about the purpose of our visit. I'm not sure whether he was using a word I don't know or what, but I still didn't get it when he repeated the question, so he switched to English. I had that type of thing happen 2-3 times during the week. Still, I'm really happy with where I am right now.