Success and Failure in Slovak #2: Sucking Less
I've now been in Slovakia for about three and a half weeks. It's been nice to take a break after such a hectic end to last year, but it has also been an onslaught of language.
For probably the last six months of last year, I barely even looked at my flashcards let alone tried to create new ones or read my children's books in Slovak. Needless to say that my arrival was full of guilt knowing that I could have memorised a hell of a lot more vocabulary or grammar than I had. But I faced the harsh reality - I now live in a country where I don't speak the language; I am the minority!
Although I obviously do not speak Slovak well at all, I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that my Slovak language abilities are not as bad as I thought they were. It would seem my acquisition of a few phrases and reading books with translations has allowed me to acquire some vocabulary, a bit of grammar, but more importantly, it seems that my brain is now fast enough to recognise words in a sentence and I'm finally hearing words clearly. But for every step forward, there were already two steps backwards.
The grammar of Slovak is incredibly complex for me as a native English speaker. They seem obsessed with nouns and change them as much as possible. I'd already noticed a certain nominative predisposition of Slovaks having edited a few articles written in English by various people I know. Each sentence seemed to have nouns popping out of every word! But now I understand. Slovak is a declensional language, that is, like Latin, in Slovak each noun is marked according to it's grammatical category, of which they have six: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, locative, and instrumental. So for each noun you have to learn its six forms, which are then complicated by the fact that each word is also marked by one of three grammatical genders, and forms change between singular and plural. You can imagine what kind of tantrum my brain is throwing at this mindbending task. But there is hope yet.
My mother-in-law bought me a Slovak language self-study series for Christmas. Now, although I normally have quite a few issues with prescriptive approaches to language learning and prefer a self-oriented, problem-solving method, even I can accept the fact that any resource of language learning can be useful. So, I've been studying almost every day and making more flashcards, and revising them more importantly. The textbooks also came with CDs filled with short recordings of conversations, so I've adopted an audio-lingual approach, and am listening to these repetitively, basically almost trying to memorise them. My plan is to build up a solid database of language, that is, words, phrases, and conversations with information about vocabulary and syntax that I can draw upon to start communicating a bit with people.
I am not proud to say it, but it has definitely been those personal issues of confidence and self-consciousness that are holding me back. Slovaks, while incredibly friendly in social situations, are pretty abrupt and inconsiderate in public interactions. It's a dichotomy that has really done my head in; they are so nice when you meet them, but they will then push in front of you in a queue without a second thought! Anyway, to avoid staring eyes and public embarrassment, I have been overly reliant on my in-laws to help me get by. I think I need to just bite the bullet and jump in. Oh, and keep up my studies at the same time.
Wish me luck!