I am pleased to see that this thread is developing into a thread encouraging those of us who are keen to improve our Spanish to find ways of doing so.
Johnzx, you may be 72 now, but didn't you say you had been here 25 years? Which made you 47 when you first moved to Spain, if my deductions (and subtractions) are correct! My point was that you are never too old to learn, though obviously the younger you are, the easier it will be.
I learnt French at school, but that was many, many years ago. I now find that if i try to speak French when I meet French people here, I end up talking a mix of Spanish and French. What would you call that? We say Spanglish if people mix Spanish and English (a good friend of ours is fluent in Spanglish!) So do I speak Spench? Spançais? Frañol?
Bri, you are right about different accents being a challenge. In Murcia they drop letters all over the place: adio, bueno día, do are fairly straightforward to recognise, but then they say mercao etc missing out letters in the middle of words, so it's not just the speed that can make it tricky. Having said that, in the UK it can be difficult at times to understand people with strong regional accents, even though in theory we all speak the same language!