One of the fun parts about traveling and speaking another language: sometimes my Spanish is really good, but the past few days people haven’t been able to understand me and asked me to switch to English. Maybe I got lazy, maybe my mouth is moving weird, but it happens. It comes back eventually. I hope
edit: the other part about it is that it does feel embarrassing, because I’m just ordering a coffee and failed to do that. Eh, whatever.
The other day I joined a Spanish conversation and the first thing that came into my head was French. 🙄
A friend said he’s better at speaking Spanish when he’s tired because he doesn’t overthink it.
I’ve found this too: I’m learning German and the first few days in Germany my level was really good. But after a few days my brain seemed to give up and speak in more primitive sentences and started to forget words. I don’t get how it was possible given that I had been constantly speaking it for the past 72 hours.
As someone in the process of learning Spanish, some days I just have a mental fog, but I just assume that’s part of the process. Like your brain forcing its own rest day. If it came easy everyone would be polyglots.
Demasiado mota
No puedo hablar español hoy. When I visited sometimes it felt natural to me. Other times I get choked up trying to remember one word in a sentence and it ruins the whole delivery, where I would have just gotten by just replacing one word with English.
I think this happens at any fluency level. Sometimes I forget extremely common words in Spanish and I’m conversationally fluent. Sometimes my brain just flips to English mode and I lose the sentence structure somewhere between my brain and mouth. Best you can do is practice more until you aren’t thinking about it.