On learning Spanish

I'm getting better at Spanish. This is a good thing, since that's really why I'm here. But it's not quite the way I expected. I thought I would learn lots of new words, and that would constitute becoming fluent. But I've realized that my lack of fluency wasn't really a lack of knowing words. I know a lot of words. The problem was identifying them when I heard them and putting them together to make sentences. Living in Spain, I now actually use the words that I know. All those vocab lists I learned over the years come to life here, and almost makes all those vocab quizzes worth it...