Will it be rare, medium or well done?

I am now one week away from my Spanish exam. I feel like I am well done but sometimes the inside of my Spanish is still pink & mushy. Just don't put the fork in too far. These are cuy (guinea pig) being roasted in Ecuador.

Probably the turning point in my feeling more confident in Spanish was going on the immersion trip to Ecuador. I can understand way more Spanish than I could before. When I got back from Ecuador and turned on CNN Espanol it was like night and day compared to what I could understand before I went. I have been back at FSI four weeks now. I still can't say I feel much different but at the same time I know so much more Spanish than before. When I look back through some of my old notebooks and the old Nuevas Rutas libros I can really see how far I have come.

My learning consultant told me last week she thought I was at the 3 level and if I worked hard I could possibly get a 3+. That was probably the wrong thing to tell me, because this week my teacher said she thought my Spanish was a little worse. She said maybe I was too relaxed about it. The thing is, now I have kind of a "big picture" Spanish. I can understand and make myself understood but I cannot stop making little mistakes. For example, today I couldn't conjugate nosotros correctly in any tense. At the same time I know I realize I am making errors I am powerless to correct them. I can only think about one thing at a time. This means that I can either focus on vocabulary and keeping the words coming, or I can focus on noun/verb agreement and conjugations, but not both. That is why speaking Spanish requires so much concentration. You don't have to think about your grammar in your native language. It just either sounds right or it doesn't. Even weirder, I have caught myself saying strange things in English or mispronouncing English words. My poor brain is short-circuiting.

This is probably some milestone or dire sign of deterioration in language learning. Possibly I am going to stay monolingual but in Spanglish. My Spanish is improving while my English suffers. This is a strange phenomenon that all of us have noticed in our language classes. We can also understand each other's Spanish so much more easily than our teacher's Spanish. Even when we make up words, which turn out to be false cognates (false friends, as they say in Spanish--e.g. experienzar, militario), our classmates can totally understand us.

Today two of my good friends at FSI took their Spanish exams. One passed and one didn't. I really couldn't tell you why because they both seemed at similar levels. It had to be nerves or just the topics they were asked to speak about, because both of them were very prepared. Maybe the tester just stuck the fork in too far.