Strain.

So, even though my high school gpa was ruined by my grades in language, I really thought that I would be fluent in six months.  So not true.  I've tried self-paced online tutorials, 80 hours of private lessons, group lessons 4 hours a day and now group lessons 1.5 hours a week.  Eleven months later, I am so frustrated by this!  

Anna summed it up when she said it was really about motivation.  To learn spanish you must memorize a ton of stuff.  Boring!  I find boring stuff is better in small doses, so my new method is a fun group class once a week and monotonous irregular verbs and thousands of verb tenses every day for one hour.  If you are great at languages, I envy you. 

I still really want to make it to being an intermediate speaker...which is officially defined as a person who "can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible w/o strain for either party."  Strain.  That's so exactly it!

          Telemarketer:  Hello, would you be interested in participating in our survey?
          Me:  (pause, composing carefully...) I'm sorry, I am not interesting.

          Friend:  The party will be great, are you coming too?
          Me:  Yes, I am so exciting!