language barriers

I have discovered something more difficult than listening to lectures all day in a language I partly understand: listening to lectures all day in two languages that I partly understand. The conference I attended of the weekend was bilingual: Serbian/Italian. I know Spanish well and there is a lot of overlap between it and Italian. So unlike everyone else in the room, who only had to pay attention for the half of the time when the language that they knew fluently was being spoken, I was always listening, trying to piece the lectures together from some Serbian and some Italian and maybe an English cognate or two in there somewhere. Exhausting.

At least during meals, if I was sitting at a table with both Serbians and Italians, everyone spoke English.