I am bad at natural languages, but I am Dutch so my television when I was young was English, German, French, Flemish and bad bad Dutch tv. So I have some advantage but communicating with a few words, English and hands and feet works fine with the locals. My wife learns languages very fast (she is also dutch but she learned Mandarin when we were working in china and was good with the locals when we left) so that helps, but the people mostly speak English and insist on speaking English to practice; these are 20-50 y/o Spanish, Portuguese and expats.

It took about 2 years to be an integral part of the community in spain; Portugal took a few months and we don’t speak Portuguese yet because everyone understands English and with Spanish Portuguese is not hard to understand. But all communications are in English really.