Learning Bosnian

One of the interesting and entertaining aspects of living here is learning Bosnian. If you know Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian, you will be able to communicate almost anybody in former Yugoslavia. When Yugoslavia was dissolved into smaller countries, each new country adapted the original Serbo-Croatian language into something they could call their own. Bosnian seems to be the most complicated of the these languages though. As I have discovered over these past 3 months, Bosnian has 7 cases, and I've only really learned one so far: nominative. I don't know a whole lot yet, but this I think is what makes their language the most complicated one I've seen so far. It's like German on crack.

Of course, the first thing we learned upon our arrival besides zdravo (hello) and pivo (beer) was how to count. Rehearsals for the orchestra are run in Bosnian, and numbers are an essential part of understanding where a conductor wants the orchestra to start. Unfortunately, numbers confused me a lot for the first month I was here. Many of them have similarly sounding syllables, and people abbreviate them differently. It reminds me the problem of hearing the difference between 13 and 30 in English. Also, because of the different cases, the endings to the numbers change to agree with the noun they modify. This really tripped me up in the markets. Bosnians would say 'dvie marka' instead of the 'dva marka' I was expecting. I would then give them three marks because I thought they said 'tri marka.'

Since we've gotten here, we've had several information-packed lessons with one of the women who works for the orchestra. She has the certification to teach Bosnian, and man is she a good teacher. Everything we have learned has proven to be quite useful. Our first lesson involved learning how to pronounce the Bosnian alphabet. Everything in Bosnian is pronounced how it looks, so once we get those sounds down, it'll be a breeze. Even having been here for 3 months, I am still struggling with it though. They have quite a few soft consonants that all sound very similar: č (tch) and ć (ch), c (tse) and s (se), dž (dje) and đ (je) and ž (dge). Then there is the elusive lj sound. Ivana says that it is made by saying ye and adding an l sound to the front of it without quite touching your tongue to the inside of your mouth. Unfortunately, this sound is a part of a word I use almost every day when I buy bread (hljeb) from the bakery. Another difficulty with pronouncing Bosnian is the fact that they tend to cram a bunch of consonants together like in the word 'prvi' (first). It seems like the letter r is kind of used as a vowel, since they roll their r's. I've never been able to do that, so it might be a while before I can master it. Besides the alphabet, we have learned common rehearsals phrases, how to telling time, how to read dates, basic present-tense verb conjugation, and how to form questions. I am always looking forward to our next lesson.

I never would have thought that I would ever move to a country before learning the language. It's made for some interesting communication issues here. Since my vocabulary is very basic, I generally get two reactions to speaking Bosnian. First, there are the people who I fool with my ability to say hello and ask how they are doing. They just kind of ramble in Bosnian at me, and I usually just smile and nod. Eventually if it's someone I know, I'll ask for them to translate. Otherwise, I am forced to admit that I don't really speak Bosnian. The other reaction is laughter. Let's face it, I sound funny when I speak Bosnian, and sometimes I can't hear the difference between how I'm saying it and how it should sound. All of the embarassment of failing at Bosnian will be worth it though when I can finally go into a store and have a real conversation with the person behind the counter. Sometimes I feel a little dependent on English speakers here, and it would be nice to go somewhere new in the city and not have to worry about people there being able to understand me.