Life Abroad
The little language things that make living overseas so much fun.
Five months in, and I can finally converse in Croatian!
I was going to write my next post about my experiences with local cuisine, but I’ve had an exciting few days with regards to my language progress, so food will be next time - with plenty of photos! Today: Language!
In the last three days, I have had four successful interactions in Croatian with people “out in the wild.” May not seem very important, but it gives me so much joy to be able to hold short, slow conversations with people in my target language!
On Sunday, during coffee fellowship time after church, I was able to ask the lovely woman who usually makes and distributes the coffee (and often sings with the worship team during the service, as well) what she does for work, and tell her that my mom is coming to visit me and that we’ll be going back to the States together. Then, over lunch with my friend and two ladies from the church I don’t know well, I was able to tell them a little about my writing. I was also, in these conversations, able to understand more of what they were talking about - not word-for-word, but enough words in context to get the general idea. Huge leap forward in any language-learning journey, and a delight when living in a place where you didn’t speak the language on arrival. I feel like in that one day my social circle expanded tenfold, lol.
Then today, I ran some errands and managed to have brief conversations with workers at the post office and grocery store, all in Croatian! (I did clarify something at the post office in English to make sure I was understanding her correctly…I was not.) These conversations were very brief indeed, but they were two-way conversations and my brain didn’t freeze up and refuse to code switch to Croatian. Very exciting!
You may think five months is a long time to be studying a language before being able to converse in it even a little, and it is if you’re studying in a traditional school setting. But I’m taking one-hour private lessons just once or twice a week, plus occasionally chipping away at units in the free government online course, and studying the vocab and grammar I learn from these two sources rather haphazardly. I also only started going to church in Pula in late January, and practicing every week or two with a new friend about that same time. Combine all that with the fact that, as a writer, I spend most of my time alone, and I really don’t have tons of exposure to the language despite living here. So I’m pretty happy with my progress. :)
That is all.