limon

I've often recommended to my friends who are looking to improve and get comfortable reading English to start with popular mass market genre or YA type books. Something like Harry Potter, romance or adventure novels, or the like. The language is usually good but not too intricate, and the plots are interesting and keep you reading even if you don't get every little nuance.

Yes, it's the 'sound vowel' not 'official vowel' that is what you need to pay attention to. Read it aloud if you have any doubts about a word

Hah, those are both good. Mencken was full of great quotes XD The second one reminds me of this one; "If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur." -Doug Larson

It was Russian, but with the political situation over there I can't see myself visiting anytime soon so not sure anymore :/

Yes, it's handy for limited things and emergency situations. It's also a good travel app for when you want to convey a single word that you can't describe by hand gestures. For anything over a simple sentence it's tricky. I've had some good results with things like receiving an email in a foreign language and running it through it; the results were not pretty, but I did manage to communicate with a German this way for basic instructions and directions.

Spelunking. Actually a pretty badass concept, to explore a cave. But man it sounds like something that happens while you're unwell.

There's another thread that I misread as being for quotes about the English language, but was just for quotes in English, so I decided I would start the one I imagined myself. My favourite, I'm sure you've seen it; "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." —James D. Nicoll, in rec.arts.sf-lovers,

Yes, altrouge is basically correct. 'Lo siento' literally translates to 'I feel it', so that can be a good rule of thumb to remember the difference. If you what you want to convey is "excuse me" then go with "perdon". I saw a good description of this a few years go along the lines of "If you're trying to get past someone in your row of seats at the movies you say 'perdon', but if you then step on their toes while doing so, you say 'lo siento'!"

What Alfonso said is accurate, there isn't a single Spanish accent any more than there is a single English accent. You do want to practice enough to learn the rhythm of the language if you can without thinking of it as a specific accent, I think that makes a big difference. That is the accents in the sense of where the emphasis of each word and sentence goes. For example you can always tell when an actor has learned Spanish phonetically for a role since the flow of their sentences is always weird and sometimes robotic.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I was born and raised in Spain so I'm fluent in both languages