Now that I have (begrudgingly) returned from Croatia, time for an update on my language efforts.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately this will be a short post, as it seems that the English language has invaded Croatia. Almost everyone that we talked to had a grasp of English, even if only some simple words or sentences. This is unsurprising as tourism is their primary industry, but a little disappointing as I was hoping to pick up more Croatian than I did. Another surprise was the number of people who speak German as a second or third language \u2013 although apparently the Germans have known about Croatia as a tourist destination for a lot longer than English-speakers.<\/p>\n
What I did pick up was useful \u2013 dobar dan<\/strong> (good day<\/em>) was particularly helpful as people would often greet us in the street. Hvala <\/strong>(pronounced \u2018hwala\u2019, thanks<\/em>) was another good one, although often people would say \u2018thank you\u2019 to me anyway! Molim<\/strong> (please<\/em>) was the other most frequently used word. I did pick up some pronunciation tips as well \u2013 hv seems to be said as \u201chw\u201d and Brac (with an accent on the c) as \u2018Bratch\u2019. In this sense I didn\u2019t find phrasebooks helpful as it is difficult to get a sense of how something is said just by reading it. It was only after listening to native speakers say words numerous times that I managed to imitate words. <\/p>\n Anyway, I can highly recommend a visit to Croatia \u2013 it\u2019s incredibly beautiful and very easy to travel around!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now that I have (begrudgingly) returned from Croatia, time for an update on my language efforts. Unfortunately this will be a short post, as it seems that the English language has invaded Croatia. Almost everyone that we talked to had a grasp of English, even if only some simple words or sentences. This is unsurprising […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,40],"tags":[699,3,5,892,40,123],"class_list":["post-1157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-language-acquisition","tag-croatian","tag-english","tag-german","tag-holiday-language","tag-language-acquisition","tag-language-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1159,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions\/1159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}