Montenegrin Language/Sayings

As most of you know, I suck at languages. Montenegrin is now the TENTH language I've attempted to learn (in addition to English, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, French, Russian, Kazakh, Sesotho, and Hawaiian), and outside of Spanish and Russian, I can barely say anything beyond Hello, How are you, My name is, etc.  I'm doing a LITTLE better than my first go round with Peace Corps in Kazakhstan as the language classes now have 2 teachers and I really made more of an effort.  But I still won't get beyond low-intermediate.

It doesn't help that the language is often listed as one of the 10 most difficult to learn. And when I say this, I say that Serbian is often listed as one of the 10 most difficult.  See earlier post re: Montenegro/Serbia, and also note that the joke here is that when we return to the states, we can tell folks we now know Montenegrin, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, as they are all very similar - and of course no American would know the difference  

On the one hand, it is relatively easy to read as you generally pronounce every letter in a word - much like Hawaiian. And, that is, if you are reading it in the latin alphabet and not the Cyrillic. The problem is, the language is VERY consonant heavy, so you have words like this gem: Srpskohrvatshi which means Serbo-Croatian. Naturally.

The locals here are uniformly shocked when I tell them Americans aren't forced in school to learn a language and that very very few speak even a second, let alone 3 or more. Montenegrin schoolchildren are required to learn English as a second language and then MUST choose a third - usually Russian, Italian, German, or French. 

During training, I actually was watching reruns of "Teen Wolf" with Montenegrin subtitles, and that helped a bit.  And when the host fams here is at their weekend house, I'll watch the occaional American flick on one of their cable channels with local subtitles.  But I just can't turn that corner.  Sigh.

I HAVE learned a couple of "fun" local phrases they have here, tho - of course put downs. One of their faves is "You're zero of a man." Can't get much worse than that! lol

But my very favorite is this one: "You goat of a goat's goat!"  Now THAT is one I hope to remember to use from now on!  :)  

 Disclaimer: Any thoughts, observations, opinions, etc. are of course mine and not necessarily the views of Peace Corps.