Urban Dictionary

It started out innocently. I was looking up the Spanish word for butterfly to try and figure out something I'd heard on the news, when, flipping through my Spanish dictionary I happened upon the word boner. (It was the first word on its page, so it was written in bigger letters at the top.) There were three Spanish words listed: gazapo, patochada, and plancha. I only recognized plancha, which I think means fried when used in the context of food. Boner seemed awfully slangy for my Spanish-English dictionary, so I decided to see what the English translations of the Spanish translations were. Kind of like that game telephone.

gazapo: young rabbit, cunning fellow, fib, lie, slip, blunder.
patochada wasn't in the Spanish section.
plancha: sheet, slab, plate, flatiron, horizontal suspension (in gymnastics). Naut gangway, gangplank. Inf howler.

Huh? Now I'm all confused.

Anyway, I was watching TV because I'm trying to be in hard core learn Spanish mode. My interest and enthusiasm for learning Spanish really comes and goes; sometimes I'm all gung-ho about it, but then I'll go for days or longer where the Spanish language is nothing but an annoyance to me and all I want to do is read, speak, and hear English. Now that teaching is pretty much done, though, I really need to spend more time on Spanish. I don't feel like I've improved much since I got here, and that's bad. I was thinking of taking an intensive class for a few weeks, but my Spanish teacher doesn't think it's worth the money. She says all I'll learn is grammar and I already know grammar; what I need is to do more language exchanges to practice speaking and listening. That should have been good news: I'll save money and she told me my Spanish isn't so bad. The thing is that I'm really good at being a student. It's one of my skills. And I'm really bad at having conversations in Spanish. I know, I know, that's why you practice, so you get better. But I really prefer doing things I'm good at to doing things that I suck at. I guess my bad Spanish isn't a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. [Although I was reading recently about learning languages through hypnosis....]