Spanish UI Challenge

I have been taking Spanish for over four years now, and I think it's time to make a real effort to increase my vocabulary. I have quite a handle on grammar, but I simply can't remember all the words from classroom exercises. This severely limits my capabilities in using the language.

So I'm going to force myself to learn more words.

I have decided to change my Windows display language to Spanish for at least a week. Webpages will still be in English, but Microsoft application text (e.g. Explorer special folder names, Office captions, Control Panel items) and the text of other applications that notice and respect the system language (e.g. Chrome) will appear in Spanish.

I was planning on using the Spanish keyboard so that I could type in Spanish, but my physical keyboard is not marked for Spanish, so all the non-alphanumeric keys produce the wrong symbols. I had to change the keyboard layout back to US English, but the Language Bar makes it easy to switch if I ever need to.

So far, I have been challenged by the different sort orders created by the different names of icons. In Control Panel (el Panel de control) especially, everything is in a totally different place than I expected. I find myself relying a lot on icons.

Also, some applications (e.g. Paint) change their shortcuts depending on your language. For example, it seems the standard "save" shortcut in Spanish is Ctrl+G, for "guardar." Unfortunately, some applications forget to localize all their shortcuts and therefore end up with conflicts. Paint, for one, actually displays the grid when I press Ctrl+G instead of saving like the ToolTip says.

This entire experience should improve my Spanish abilities, especially technical vocabulary. (It might also decrease the spelling quality on my blogs - I had to disable Chrome spellcheck because it checks everything as Spanish!)