Learning Spanish: Making it a priority

Recently a reader of my blog emailed this advice:

Try to make learning Spanish a priority for yourselves. After all, Spanish is the primary language of Mexico. My experience is: (1) Spanish is an easy language to learn when compared with most other languages and (2) your relationships with locals will be far more satisfying because of a reduced level of superficiality. In other words, most Mexicans will appear friendly because you are gringos with money. But you will never truly acquire their respect and admiration without speaking their language.

I'm fluent if horribly ungrammatical and with a thick American accent... and I do work on learning some new words most days. (Some days just get away from a person...) I don't exactly agree with the comment that the friendliness comes from our apprearing rich, because I see it as a built-in aspect of the culture.

But I do agree with the last comment about the importance of speaking the language. Recently I sat on the porch of a well-educated Mexican family having a glass of white wine with them and feeling like an idiot for not being able to speak Spanish in a way that showed I too was a well-educated citizen of the world! Oh well. Those darn verb tenses need more of my time than I've found for them this year so far!