WOW

WORLD OF WORDS = WOW

Sometimes I feel there are too many words in my head. How did it start?!

I come from the Czech Republic. It used to be part of  former Czechoslovakia which meant that we had two official languages - Czech and Slovak. They were both used... in the TV news etc., and because of that we were almost bilingual, but I would say passively because many people could understand the other language, but couldn't really speak it. It was very normal to have a conversation in two languages. I would speak Czech to somebody and they would reply in Slovak.
Although these two languages are very similar, there are many words that are completely different and you had to learn them. Sometimes even the whole sentence wouldn't make sense if you didn't know the words. It was a really strange scenario when I think about it now. Both languages were simply part of our lives, but not anymore.  I hear that young Czechs and Slovaks today no longer understand the other language.

As my country is a post-communist country, we were forced to learn Russian, but I didn't mind. It is the only language on my list that has a different alphabet. O.K., it is not Chinese characters, but it can still get confusing...P is actually -r- , C is -s-, B is -v- and so on :-)

My second choice after that was English. The more I learned English the more I loved it.  I will talk about its "versions" later :-)

Now, let's talk German. I must be honest here. German language was not on the top of my list. Well, it wasn't on my list in any shape or form at all, and then I moved to Germany. You can read about my reasons in other posts.
Before I relocated to my neighbours' country I didn't know anything about this language, so I could only judge it from listening and didn't have particularly flattering opinion. I thought it was the worst sounding language ever, so when I realised I would be moving to Germany, I was thinking: "How on earth am I going to deal with this?" I did and don't find German so bad anymore, but it has never become my favourite language...I just got used to it.

What did become my favourite language is French. Yes, I had a chance to learn French in France where we relocated after our German adventure. It was a great struggle at the beginning, but it was definitely worth it.

I find languages fascinating, especially because they affect every part of your life and can tell you so much about  a country, culture etc. So, I decided I will blog about it as well.
Look for the posts under the label WOW - World Of Words.