Communicating with Foreigners!

I found myself thinking today, after a session of basketball with some South American teams, about how arrogant we are when we attempt to communicate with people in their native tongue. We speak in broken phrases and incorrect vernacular that we believe they should understand. If you think about it, in fact we are showing them just how unintelligent we really are. Yes, I know we are just giving it our best attempt at conversing but just imagine if we talked to each other with this broken grammar. It is an elementary english teacher's worst nightmare. I didn't realize how ridiculous I sounded until I began asking my friend if we could listen to music on his phone and the only words I could get out were, "Phone…uh…music….mmmm…listen….in sauna." It was as if I had lost my cognitive ability to put thoughts together into a sentence. He simply laughed and reminded me that he spoke the same language as me and I didn't have to break it down for him. It dawned on me that this is essentially how stupid we sound when we attempt to mix English and Spanish together incoherently into a phrase to get our message unsuccessfully across to someone who can't speak English. I have a very select vocabulary in Spanish from my 3 years of Spanish that ended when I was 16. This allows me more to understand than actually communicate this week with our friends from the south, but when they need to know what is happening I merely resort back to my caveman like phrasing of their language. I believe this will be the beginning of my very sincere attempt to learn a new language. As of now I think I'll probably try to start increasing my knowledge of the Spanish language since that is what I am presented with most frequently here in the United States but Russian is a language I really want to master because of our frequent trips to Russian speaking countries through wrestling. This revelation I have had today makes me really appreciate foreigners that can speak English so much more. I will never laugh at anyone ever again for their struggles to communicate with me because I'm sure my attempts to communicate in their language are just as bad!