This is how you lose her

I just started reading the book This is how you lose her by Junot Diaz. I am kind of confused with the book at the moment and for two reasons. One because the characters speak Spanish, as well as English and there are a lot of Spanish words in the book. "This is the end game and instead of pulling out all the stops, instead of pongadome mas chivo que un chivo, I'm feeling sorry for myself como un pariguayo sin surete."  I myself know practically no Spanish, even though I took Spanish classes for the past 3 school years (I finally dropped it this year) and I get really confused over the Spanish words and I feel like it effects my full understanding of the book because I don't want to stop and look up every Spanish word I see because I would be looking up like two words per page.


The second reason I am confused with the book is it keeps switching between past and present tense and between different characters and sometimes I'm not quite sure what tense it is in or who is speaking. For most of it the book is in past tense but sometimes it switches back to present tense and I get a bit confused. I wish it would give you a warning of when it is switching tense or it would only switch tense every chapter.