Viator Viator Travel Blog

How long may you spend in a country before you make an effort to learn the language?

I have been visiting Croatia regularly for three years. I have even had a couple of jobs here and now have decided to settle here for a while. But I still can’t speak Croatian. I don’t blame myself – it’s a difficult language and not one I had any exposure to growing up. But I hate sitting in bars with friends who are all forced to speak English so I can be part of the conversation, or who speak their own language and then feel rude for leaving me out. It’s their country! I am the one with the language problem, not them.

So, I have enrolled in the summer school beginners’ course at the university.

Every weekday for a month, I have a two and a half hour class. There are eight of us, and about another forty people doing the higher-level classes. Once a week we have an extra class in grammar revision, and a lecture in culture: history, art or literature. These lectures are really interesting – I assume… because they are in Croatian so we beginners are a little lost! The school also organises a couple of field trips so we can see a bit of the country, use our newly acquired language, and bond with the other students.

At high school, I learnt French for four years. In Australia, I had little chance to practice it and it all seemed a bit abstract really. Back then, there weren’t many foreign films on TV and the ones at the cinema were too racy for us schoolkids (come on, they were French!). So, I had almost no chance to practice and conjugating verbs came a distant second to other teenage pursuits.

Then I went to France. And I was surprised how much of it had stuck. My vocabulary was limited; I met very few people who wanted to hear that the ruler was on the desk or that the pen belonged to my aunt. But those basics of sentence construction were deeply ingrained, and every time I visit France my language skills improve.

I really really believe one of the greatest gifts you can give a child is exposure to different languages. Especially from a young age when they are still learning to shape their mouths around sounds. I’m not saying send them to language school at 3, but perhaps CDs of nursery rhymes in other languages is not such a stupid idea.

A Dutch friend of mine says that for each language you know, you acquire another soul. And I sort of see what he means. The flip side of that is a Columbian guy in my class who speaks English to his Croatian wife, and all of us, and says that his Columbian friends say he loses his personality when he speaks English – his wordplay humour and wicked jokes are missing. He’s really worried about being stripped of even more of himself by Croatian, a language full of pitfalls. Similarly, a friend in Amsterdam, who is Brazilian/German with an English wife, sometimes feel frustrated that his relationship can not be in his native tongue; his English is fantastic but he still feels he misses nuance and the ability to fully express some emotions.

The course I am doing is very grammar based. Being run by the university, it is concerned with correct, formal language and with equipping people to be able to go on and study here. There are exams and certificates.

The alternative method is total immersion. And I wonder if that would be more useful for me. The rough and ready communication style. You can get your point across but perhaps I will have used the Genetiv instead of the Locativ case – oops! But if I’m understood and don’t want to write a PhD in Croatian, does it matter? I just want to be able to order a meal. To stop looking like a deer in the headlights whenever someone speaks to me in a shop. Instead I now spend my mornings looking like a dog being taught a card trick in a classroom.

Doing a four week summer school as opposed to a full three month semester means we are on a bit of a crash course. The information is coming thick and fast with little time for our brains to absorb the three genders, seven cases and ludicrous number of exceptions to the rules. I have reached Confusion Level 7 but I hope to come out the other side back at Croatian 101. At least I am not dealing with a different alphabet, like Cyrillic for Serbian or Russian, or the script for any of the Asian languages.

I had always contemplated going somewhere to learn a language. The idea of travel with a purpose appeals. I think you discover a lot more about a place when you have a day to day routine, live in the city, find your way around, interact with the bureaucracy etc. And, of course, when you can understand the language. Reading the daily papers makes you feel you’re getting under the surface of the city.

In her bestseller Eat Pray Love (highly highly recommended), Elizabeth Gilbert spends a few months in Italy learning Italian. She so wonderfully evokes the joys and frustrations and the benefits it brought to her time in Rome. The thing with Italian though, is that people learn it just for the hell of it. As Gilbert says, no one in her class needed to learn the language, they all just wanted to because it is so beautiful and romantic, full of hopes and dreams and fantasies. Everyone in my class is there for a clear need: they have Croatian family members, they married a Croatian, they are working here; I am probably considered the strangest – just here because I like the country, it’s lifestyle, the people.

One of the things Elizabeth Gilbert did, which I highly recommend, is finding someone who wants to learn your language so you can meet for coffee and massacre each other’s languages in order to learn. The most important, and for me most difficult, part is comprehension; understanding the foreign language spoken at an every day pace by different voices. This is one thing a short summer school at a university doesn’t really have enough time for. But I have some long-suffering Croatian friends, and a couple of slightly bemused bar staff, who are helping me along.

A friend just spent a month in Nice, France, learning French. She too had schoolgirl French, a couple of years of the basics left to fester in the back of her brain for a decade. She chose to do a fairly intense one to one course and her French is now really workable and she feels quite confident day to day. This is an expensive option but really effective.

Of course, the thing she is missing out on is making friends with other students. Suddenly you have people to have coffee with, explore the place with, and some of them have local friends and your social life suddenly blossoms. In my class, there are people from Germany, Sweden, Columbia, Mexico, Portugal, Italy, America; I am learning a lot more than just Croatian.

I resisted formal classes in any language during the last four years in Europe, some of which was spent living and working in various countries. As a writer! (Luckily they let me work in English.) But being submersed anywhere for any length of time, you naturally pick up the basics. And even if you can only say Hello and Goodbye, please and thank you, people appreciate the effort.

One thing I did do when I first arrived here was learnt to count to 100. This made life a lot easier. Numbers, days of the week, months, basic words, foods on menus – those things are all hugely helpful and guidebook included. But the thing that so quickly became obvious to me in every country was that no matter how well I practised questions from my phrasebook, I could not understand the answers! And yet, phrasebooks still sell, sell, sell. Go figure.

Every time I pass one of the many, many churches here, I want to head in and put in a good word for the fish-in-the-ear from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Why, oh why, can we not get some chip implanted in our heads that make us instantly speak and comprehend? Why do I have to torture myself with these seven cases and difficult pronunciations?

I had a dream the other night that at the end of the four weeks our patient teacher, Goranka, stood up and said: Just Joking, here are your implants, and she gave each of us a small chip to slide behind our ears and suddenly we were fluent. Very Bladerunner, I know. And yet it’s the dream that I wish most would come true.

-Philippa Burne