kubitsky.net

I’ve been taking a Croatian language course for 3 weeks now and I don’t feel as though I’m progressing as much as I would have hoped. Many know that as an adult, it is very difficult to learn a new language if you’ve never successfully learned a second language before. In high school I studied Spanish, but it was only for 3 years, I never used it and I don’t remember much of it today. In college I studied Russian for 2 semesters. I remember some, and Russian is similar in root to Croatian, but I didn’t learn enough and I haven’t used it since.

I’ve been listening to Croatian (or Serbian) somewhat regularly, although limited at times, for the past 8-9 years. It was about 9 years ago that I met my boyfriend and a few other really great ex-Yugoslavians from Drexel. Since then I’ve been learning the language off-and-on on my own for the past 8 years. Needless to say, I am far better at reading and translating written Croatian than I am at anything else because I didn’t have much practice conversing in it.

Learning the language, by being immersed in it and forced to use it is one of the many reasons why I wanted to come live in Croatia. Being here has definitely exposed me to more spoken conversations, but I’m still not confident enough to contribute. I have difficulty hearing all of the words that are being said. Most of the time I hear only basic words and a few major words from someone and I can derive a concept from it and understand. But, quite often, I get stuck translating a word and miss the rest of the sentence. To strangers I look as though I’m dumb and then I end up saying

“Ne govorim hrvatski. Samo govorim engleski.”

Then they say sorry and keep quiet.

I had high hopes for my language course, but it is not living up to them. My classes largely consist of me reading aloud my homework from the previous class and then doing some exercises or reading aloud of small paragraphs from the work book. There is little real world, one-on-one dialogue between my instructor and myself. Today I asked her to modify the lessons so that we could spend more time on covering what I am weak in–conversations. I have my next class tomorrow and I hope that it is better.

There are only about 12 weeks left to my stay in Croatia and I would like to be able to hold real conversations in Croatian with my boyfriend’s friends and family. There is at least one friend and all of his family that do not speak much English at all and I would like to get to know them better and let them know me.