Learning Serbian
One of the first things I needed to do was to start the long road of learning a foreign language. Even though I had been coming here for 10 years, I was never been here long enough to really get immersed in the language. I could say hello and ask for a beer at the bar, but not much more. The first choice was a class at one of the language institutes that meets multiple time a week. You would meet other English speaks in the same boat and there were several options in town, but not in New Belgrade. The problem is getting there, parking and getting back or taking the tram which adds another hour and a half to the equation of dead time sitting on the bus.
I still plan to look more into those options one day when we are living in town and I do not have to drive from New Belgrade and park in downtown. I knew I could not do this on my own. There are a few apps to learn Serbian, none seemed very help except for a few things here and there. So, I kept looking for options and found Preply , a completely online solution to learning. The site has a number of language and tutors in other topics including math, science, philosophy, computer science, business, economics, and even photography.
You log onto the Preply page chose the topic that you want and you are presented with a list of tutors to begin your selection process. Each tutor has a description that includes their picture the languages that they speak, the years they have been teaching, the number of lessons that they have taught and a rating much like Trip Advisor or Yelp. Then there is narrative short summary describing their teaching style. You can select a few teaches to take the first lesson and if not happy will not be charged. I went ahead and paid for three different teachers since I was planning on doing this for a while and wanted a teacher that seemed to click.
All three knew the subject and had materials that they would send each week depending on the topic. It is obvious that they had thought through teaching the language before and were prepared with the necessary steps to get you there. It really came down to exactly what I thought, just a feeling about who you wanted to spend two hours a week with, trying to learn something very difficult. In the end, I chose Anka V to work with.
We are now 21 lessons into it, and I am learning. It just seems so slow and confusing so much of the time. The hour-long lesson is quite draining and intense. There are so many times I feel like a complete idiot forgetting the fact that I am no more than 4 months old. Some of the vocabularies seem to make sense and then other topics I can’t remember for anything. And I have even mentioned cases yet. Oh my!
Let’s hope I can one day figure out a little bit of the language…more in a future post if I survive.
Up next on AmericaninSerbia.com is “We Killed A Cow, Come for Steaks”
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