The pain of being average (makes me sound like an emo)

We are (and by that I mean me, though grammatically 'I am') coming up to my 3rd year anniversary with Spanish. I had written a lengthy blog about this a few days ago but it was too long winded and I never posted it. The trouble is that it made me sound like a whiny little bitch, but the truth is that my Spanish has mostly been self-taught and I was trying to explain some of the hardships (plus my unrealistic expectations). I have about 1700 hours worth of study and practice, and only 220 hours of that was formal language education, being in class and having a teacher go through it all.

Rivalry is mostly what got me started. In high school I was the best in my class at Spanish but then forgot everything. I hated saying that I used to be good at Spanish. So when I met Andrea and found that she spoke not only Spanish but Italian as well, I decided to get my ass in gear and prove to myself that I could do this. In 2006 I landed in uni and met Magda, who amazingly was on par with me (and sometimes higher) even though she had been studying Spanish for only 2 months (compared to me with a year). So for a year the two of us were the best in the class (or at least two of the top 3). The next year was a bit of a shock, as suddenly I was thrown into a class with the combined top 3's of every other class, and a few others. It felt as though I was studying more Spanish than anyone else and yet I was being left behind. Maybe it's because they were girls.

Seriously. Women's brains are geared more towards language (explaining why they gossip and chat a lot ;)) and men are more suited to science. That's why 80% of language students are women are 80% of science students are guys. But even at a stretch I can't say that they were better at me because they're girls. I don't know why they were better, they just were.

The real pain now is being surrounded by polyglots every friggin day. My roommates (all Spanish natives) are all fluent in French and speak pretty good English. All my friends here speak Spanish, + their native language + an additional language (usually English). I'm going through just 10 pages of a book a day and writing down everything that I don't yet know, to study afterwards. But I'm only able to learn 3o new words a day (50 at a stretch), and yet I come up with 120 new words from those 10 pages every day.

It's exhausting. It's fun, but going through all of this vocabularly and slang never feels like it's enough. There haven't been enough pay-offs yet. I did however have a surprise on the weekend, where I had a complete failure of English and had to go to Spanish to explain clearly. That was liberating. And while I understand the bulk of what my roommates are saying, I just wish I could respond and actually exchange in a conversation (I can talk about my day, uni, Australia and travelling well, but that's about it).

The CIA estimates that one should be basically fluent with 2,000 hours of study in Spanish, but I don't even feel advanced with 1700, so maybe with 2.5k or 3k hours I'll start to feel a little better. They estimated 450-600 hours to be intermediate, but I only felt that with 850.

So, there's a long way still to go, I'm still in over my head at uni and understand just about nothing in my lectures, but I hope that by this time next year I'll have forgotten all about the tribulations and relax a little while also being fluent. Highly fluent would be nice. Passed off as a native speaker would rock, but won't happen.