The Language Blog

As many of you know Language is our number one job right now.  In order to share the truth we have to be able to do it in the "heart language" this is never more evident to Jen and I then on Sundays as we worship in Serbian - does not move me like English.  I would like to use this blog to share about our language experience.  As we have learned more, we are getting better but it's gonna be a long while before we are competent.
First the alphabet - if you look at the bill I posted it looks totally crazy but actually the alphabet has been one of the easiest things to learn.  We are constantly surrounded by it so we have most of it down.  Kyleigh is very good with the Cyrillic and reads it very well.  The above bill was our first and our second we actually deciphered on our own. 
Second- language school.  We go to a great school.  We have three teachers so we here differntly.  Some speak English and some don't so that keeps it interesting.  Class is 1.5 hours a day everyday (not counting the two hour roundtrip bus commute).  The tough part about the language is how many ways you say a word in different situations.  They call it cases - I call it insane and unnecesary.  It's hard to explain but I'll do my best.
Third - the cases- There are seven of them and they all deal with situations when you are talking. Some times it's easy to determine the case because certain question words only go with certain cases.  Gde (where) deals with the lokative case.  Ko (who) Sta (what) deal with nomative and so on.  Now that you are confused I want to really blow your mind.  I am going to show you how many times the word me -changes depending on the case. 
Nomative - Ja (I)
Dative - Meni, Mi (me or I)
Insturmental - sa mnom
Genative - mene
locative - o meni
akuzativ - mene or me
all that just to say the word me - to make matters more complicated you can only use meni at the begining or end of a sentence and mi in the middle - I asked why and the short answer was because.
This does not take into account that for almost all words you change the ending based on the case and you also have to remember that like Spanish, Serbian has masculine and feminine endings.  You also have to take into account past or present tense - are you tired yet! :))
Now if your still reading with all that background I want to give you my language learning philosophy.
I call this partial word whole concept learning.  Basically its impossible for me to know all the words in a given sentence or question i am asked. So basically I pick out some words I do know and predict what was just said and how I should respond (Jen calls it guessing).  Now sometimes the results of this can be a disaster if you don't know the key words but this only happens to me about 60% of the time.  I just take myself to baseball and folks I'm hitting .400 and that would be considered great.  Any way i keep things lively in class because you never know what I'm going to say.