Speaking Spanish

I have realized that although I am understanding more and more Spanish as the days pass, there is one little problem.  I understand about 90% of what people are saying, but the other 10% is the important specifics.  So I may respond that yes I would love to see a certain movie without knowing I had committed to a specific time and date.  I guess this is what happens when you keep smiling and nodding to almost everything someone says.  I finally have started asking people to repeat something if I don't understand all of it.

There are also many grammar rules which after learning in high school I managed to avoid having to use in college.  In my Spanish literature classes, I didn't have to remember the proper way to describe the weather, which was fine with me since I never really could remember the proper way to say it's hot or it's cold.  Or when to use por as opposed to para.  Or the appropriate way to say "4 years ago I did...."  Or the difference between ser and estar.  But since they are actually phrases I use frequently as opposed to the literary vocabulary I was using, it's forcing me to actually learn them once and for all.

When I've talked to the English teachers at the school, we've agreed that the grammar rules for verbs are harder in Spanish than in English because there are so many tenses, and each pronoun has a different conjugation.  But in English, the pronunciation is harder.  In Spanish the rules of pronunciation are pretty cut and dry, but in English "e" could be pronounced a variety of different ways depending on the context.  For example, take the word "bear."  The -ear is pronounced as the word "air" whereas if you remove the b from "bear," "ear" is pronounced "eer" similar to "beer".  Very confusing.

The last thing which is tripping me up, is the pronoun vosotros.  Vosotros is the informal plural "you" which is a pronoun that is only used in Spain.  Because it is specific to Spain and not used in any other part of the Spanish speaking world, when we learned verb conjugation in middle school the teachers always said not to worry about the conjugation because we would likely never need it.  To address a large group, the formal plural "you" was always used.  Unfortunately, I am now in Spain, and the most appropriate way to address the students is vosotros and I am very shaky as to the proper conjugation.  Another thing that I will have to learn as I go.  After only a little over  2 weeks, I can tell that I have already improved and I am more comfortable speaking Spanish.  When I come back, I will be completely fluent!