Englian? No. Spananian? No. Englanian? Yes. If you don’t know what these are, there’s a pretty good chance that I just made these up! You see I’ve been trying to learn some Albanian but it seems it is going to be a very long and painful process with lots of embarrassing stories to come. Good entertainment for you, not so good for me :/ eek! Hopefully the Albanians will be somewhat accepting of my attempts to learn the language because I know it is going to be hard!
5 Signs I know Albanian is going to be hard to learn:
1. They don’t have a Rosetta Stone program for Albanian.
2. Albanian restaurants with waiters/waitresses to practice with are few and far between.
3. No is universal in almost every language and yep, I picked one of the few languages in which no does not mean no (jo-pronounced yo-means no).
4. I bust out laughing when I hear the pronunciation of the first word because I don’t even know how to move my mouth to get those sounds out.
5. It takes me 5 minutes to say anything resembling the word, 15 minutes to say anything resembling a short phrase, and we just won’t even think about full sentences yet.
But anyway I came up with Englanian (English & Albanian), Spananian (Spanish & Albanian) and Englananian (English, Spanish, & Albanian) because obviously I speak English, but I also speak an acceptable amount of Spanish. Albanian is, unfortunately for me, not really similar to either one. But in order to figure out how to write pronunciation guides so I can remember how to say the words when I can’t listen to the program, I am having to pull from not just English, not just Spanish, but, you guessed it, English AND Spanish. Thus the Englanian pronunciation guide. If anyone steals my flashcards, my pronunciation guides will help no one. They include English words & stresses and Spanish words & accents.
I have probably about 25 words I’m trying to learn right now. My goal is to learn them by the end of the month. We shall see how realistic that is.
All I can say is, I now know why God made me push myself so much, making me such an overachiever growing up. He was preparing me to learn Albanian.