<human>: Summarize the given text in a few sentences.

I recently moved to Los Angeles from Oregon, which means that I interact with a lot more Spanish-speaking people (mostly Mexicans) than I ever have before. I took two years of Spanish in undergrad, so I can string together a few basic sentences, but nothing very intricate, and I have trouble understanding native speakers talking at full speed. 

Sometimes we play soccer at a nearby park, and Mexicans often join in, almost all of the people who work in the cafeteria at my school are Mexican, and I buy fruit from Mexican vendors on the side of the road fairly often. Is it OK to try and talk to them in Spanish? 

I personally don't think anything is wrong with it, just want to see what other people have to say (maybe even some ESL people?). The only problem I've encountered is when they speak back to me and I can't understand, so I have to say something like "lo siento, solo hablo muy poco Español" (and I'm not even sure if that's right, but I think it gets the point across--it means something like "sorry, I only speak a little Spanish"). 

I would hope that people would respond favorably, and appreciate that I'm just trying to be friendly, but I could see people taking offense too. All I really do now is say "por favor" and "gracias," but I would like to practice a little more and try to ask "¿como estas?" and things like that, and try to have the very basic types of conversations that we had in class. 

What say you, reddit?
<bot>: I speak a little Spanish, is it rude to try and speak broken Spanish to the Mexicans that I casually interact with?