Just to clarify, if you tell someone you didn't understand their initial answer, they won't have any problem changing to Spanish.
Unless you want to pass for the equivalent of a redneck when doing bussiness in lots of American countries and also in most spanish provinces, you should remember that those words must be written in spanish as: alcoba, almíbar, gabardina, abortar, verruga, vivac, automóvil, probar, reventar, verbena, está, China and correr (with word stress in the e this time), for example.
And would be good to remind also that sometimes the same concept is treated as masculine in Spanish but is feminine in Catalán (or the opposite case). Unlike english we use different articles for masculine and femenine words so this is important. Would be like using "she" when talking about our manager John.
And this is only a small part of the complete bobby trap list.
This is not granted always. It depends on the people.
The problem is that you are trying to learn spanish being inmersed at the same time in another similar language but with different orthographic and grammatical rules. And you see examples of the non-spanish version everywhere in your journey. Should you use a 'B' or a 'V' for that word?. Sounds the same but is often the opposite in the two languages. Lots of people have problems with that without even noticing.