A major stumbling block for those trying to imbibe another language is vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary. Spanish is especially prone to causing frustration in this area because there are many, many dialects; reading literature from different Spanish Speaking areas exposes you to an enormous number of words that are vital for understanding. This causes me to read a book in Spanish much more slowly than I would read the same book in English. It takes incredible patience to attain true knowledge of the Spanish language because after you put aside the first basic textbook, you realize that nobody in the world speaks or writes (real books) in Standard Spanish.
I am planning to start a blog where I write almost everything in Spanish, but I am not naive enough to believe that I can do it without making mistakes and scrambling lots of meanings. I hope that people will politely point out my mistakes to me. Laugh if you want! It is not my fault that I was not born a native speaker, but I am very optimistic that I can come close.
