After 4 years living here, I decided to take regularly scheduled private classes. Since January, I've been taking classes for 2 hours a week. Although I've made noticeable progress, it's still a challenge to speak or listen to the language. I pat myself on the back after I've successfully had the infrequent 5 minute conversations with strangers about more complex matters than just their name, the weather and where they are from. As a few people have said, unless I have to use it on a daily basis for more than just basic conversation, I will probably never truly be fluent. I work in my house and my wife speaks English. My clients only speak English. Most of what I do involves me thinking and using English. It's difficult, but hopefully not impossible. I just need to keep on trying. I've started to watch Spanish cartoons and to a lesser extent, Spanish language TV shows. I have switched over 50% of my news to Spanish language websites and audio podcasts. I've even started poking around at some Spanish language forums. If you haven't already, you may want to check out this forum, it's great for finding translations and explanations of why things are spoken in Spanish in what appears to be odd ways to us native English speakers: WordReference.com: Spanish-English grammar. Buen suerte.
