Good post, Tordok. Give this man some reputation points!
My initially-not-so-good Spanish, learned by ear through everyday street and family use, had to improve when I started travelling and working in Latin America, because it didn't really get me very far apart from everyday chit chat and practical exchanges, and even then, it was inadequate in some situations.
One of the first things I did was enroll in an upper-intermediate course in Caracas to polish my rough edges and fill the gaps - especially grammar. A few years later I got to the point where I was able to write a report and give a presentation in Spanish, as well as engage in informal e-mail type correspondence and day to day work exchanges. My mother's verdict (her Spanish is perfect) on my first presentation was that "you can tell that the person who wrote it is not a native speaker, but otherwise, it's accurate and clear". (This is why I still don't translate
into Spanish.)
These days, when I meet my Madrid cousins, it crosses my mind that I might sound a bit strange to them - is it the equivalent of a Londoner speaking to a Trinidadian?
But speaking to them, or indeed to the sort of educated Latin Americans mentioned by Tordok I feel I can express myself fluently at a reasonably educated and informed level.
The point about making yourself understood at all levels is also relevant. I've noticed some Dominicans glaze over when confronted with a perfectly clear accent that happens to be from another part of the Spanish-speaking world, like Ecuador. I've also met Spanish people who despite having lived and worked in the DR for years insist on using
vosotros all the time which jars and must confuse a lot of less cosmopolitan speakers.
As some posters here have said, it can go too far - I have a Cuban friend who is a novelist and he has a magnificent vocabulary - but I find his writing inaccessible precisely because of that. I suspect that even most educated Spanish speakers would also have to reach for the dictionary several times a page when reading his work. I recently had to translate an article by an art critic - and it was completely unintelligible to the point where I suspected that even she didn't know what she was talking about. It used obscure and pretentious words when a simple alternative existed. As a translator, you have to be faithful to the text, but there is also that small detail of your readers needing to understand what you write.
Some Spanish speakers (and probably other languages too, but I've observed it a lot in Spain and Latin America) confuse pompous, pedantic, flowery and repetitive verbosity [this sentence might well be accused of the same thing] with erudition. You see it in journalism and literature, and in the way some people speak on TV discussion shows.
