update.

This weekend... for the first time, I've started to think in Spanish... I notice less and less of my natural tendency to come out with English to communicate something, which is a real praise the Lord moment... I was starting to wonder if it was ever going to click. I think I had a time line in my head, and I didn't think it should take me a month to start feeling comfortable with the language! But, things are starting to cement in my mind, and I feel like I'll really start making progress.
We have a bunch of new students at the school, last week we got two girls from Holland, and this week, an older guy from New York and another chick from Holland.(all along we have had another student named Brian, from the U.S., he was there a week before us and has two weeks left...)
Three times a week we have a group activity where we play some sort of game with the whole school, and it's really fun to have other students... and other nationalities. It's interesting to hear all of the Americans stumble over the pronounciation of the same words, and then hear the Dutch all stumble over different words. It's interesting what different accents do to the Spanish language. (side note, and my one source of pride in this whole experience so far... Shawna and I have been told many times that we have virtually no accent, and sound latina in our pronounciation. So at least if we have no comprehension of what's coming out of our mouths... we sound good. lol.)
Anyway, native speakers are sounding less and less fast to me, and I'm comprehending more and more... I've started reading the newspaper, which, if I'm going to be honest, i comprehend about 40% of, but it's a really good way for me to pick up more of the rythym and structure of the language, even if I fully don't understand the vocab or pronoun placement... or for that matter, the subject of the sentence. (the usage of pronouns in this language is a real beezy... sometimes it's impossible for me to pick out the subject because of the sheer amount of pronouns and their un-english placement in a sentence. Oh, another side note of confusion... it seems that the words could, should, and would are very difficult to translate into spanish. We are finding that it's really hard to communicate a... how do I say this? For lack of a better phrase, a half-assed statement. It's very hard to say something in spanish without committing fully to what you are saying, if that makes any sense. It's pretty hard to beat around the bush, I guess you could say, in Spanish, and until I had to start trying to fully communicate in spanish, I never realized how much I fully beat around the bush with almost everything that comes out of my mouth!)

So yes... there's my update on my current linguistic skills, props to anyone who read this whole boring post to the end!