She said 'focus'.

The problem with watching original version films in Spain is the subtitles are all in Spanish. Even when the characters are speaking Arabic or Urdu, which they do a lot in Syriana. Not that I expected English subtitles, but the lack thereof made an already complicated film even harder to follow.

I understood most of it, which was encouraging. But trying to read the subtitles made me realize something about communicating in a language you don't really speak. You really have to pay attention. (I guess that should have been more obvious from the start--sometimes I'm a little slow....) When speaking or reading a language in which you're fluent, you can zone out for a while. You can think about other things. You can skip words. A motorcycle driving by can drown out a sentence. And it won't really matter because you know the language so well that you fill in the gaps without even realizing it. I'm nowhere near that point in Spanish. Several times during the film I caught myself skimming the subtitles, not really understanding them, and then being frustrated that I didn't understand them. But the reason I didn't understand was I didn't read them carefully enough--I was trying to read them the way I read English. I do it in conversation, too. Sometimes I just forget to pay careful attention, because if I were speaking English I wouldn't need to hang on every word. Then things that I should be able to understand end up sounding like unintelligible noise. I think that's why I seem to be completely incapable of buying bus tickets here. Either that or they're speaking Catalan.