Learning the Spanish language, as with any other language is a daunting task. There is a lot to learn and it takes a long time to do it. However it seems to be further complicated by a fact I just recently learned. There appear to be many different kinds of Spanish. As with English you expect a language to have different dialects and accents. The people in New York Speak a lot differently form the people Georgia or Minnesota. However the basic structure is the same and the vocabulary is the same. The same is not necessarily true for Spanish.
First of all I learned there is Latin American Spanish and there is Spanish in Spain. These two things appear to actually be quite different. Sure the language is the same, most things are the same, but there are many words that are different and there is an entire verb conjugation that is used in Spain that is not used in parts of Latin America. This should not be a problem right; kind of like the English language in England has words for things that are not used in English in the United States. However, if you use a word in the US that someone would use in England 9 times out of 10 people will know what you are talking about. The same is not true when you learn the Spanish language, this I discovered recently.
As any other student of a language would, I bought a Spanish to English/English to Spanish dictionary. Should have been easy enough except for the fact that I have occasionally used words from the dictionary and people have had no idea what I was saying. After consulting with my tutor I discovered my dictionary is a Spanish for Spain dictionary and that was what was causing my problems. Of course this important piece of information was not printed on the dictionary.