Week 1 of Learning Croatian - Done

Week 1 Observations of Learning Croatian

For those who are interested in learning languages, this post is for you.  We finished our first week of learning Croatian, and our brains hurt.  We are in class for almost three hours a day for the next 4 months.  :)  Let the good times roll! 

Here's a cool thing about our class: There are 15 students and 13 countries represented:  Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Great Britain, Peru, Chile, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Argentina, Nigeria, Germany, and the United States (that's us).

Here are some cool things about Croatian:

• It is a phonetic language, so it means every letter has one distinct sound and each sound is pronounced in the word. 
• They chose to stay with the Roman Alphabet, and not Cyrillic.  This is good news for us,
• They don't use articles, for example, "a, an, the".  This a change because in French there are lots of articles: "le, la, les, de, de la, du, des, un, une".  In Croatian, they're dropped.  While it feels weird at first to drop them, maybe it's easier in the long run.

Here are some difficult things about Croatian:

• While many sounds are familiar, there are still new ones to learn, and thus we're working constantly on our pronunciation: 
• bilježnica - The "i" sounds like "ee", "lj" is one sound and is like the ending in "million", the ž is like a soft "g" like in "mirage", and the "c" is like "ts". 
• I learned this word today:  "računovotkinja" which means female accountant.  The "j" is a "y" sound like in "yum", the č is "ch" like in "chop", and the "r" is a slightly rolled r.
• There are seven cases for adjectives and nouns, which means their endings change based on where they are in the sentence.
• Each noun can be either masculine, feminine or neutral.  And based on that, they will have a different singular and plural ending.  It also seems pronouns and adjectives have to agree to the noun, and follow the declension rule. Yikes!
• On top of that, some words change to match the subject, like professions: A singular male teacher is "profesor" and plural is "profesori". A female teacher is "profesorica" and plural is "profesorice".  

So, it seems we have a lot to learn and many frustrating days ahead, but with frustration comes growth, right??