Learning a foreign language was not only a linguistic adventure for me. Whichever language you choose, climbing the ladder of proficiency unfolds in almost the same way.
Everything is great while you dabble at the beginners’ level and the words have their exact equivalents in both languages. Grammar, phrasality, pronunciation…master it and you can actually speak the lingo. The biggest challenge, however, is getting entangled in the obscure of cultural concepts – a treasure revealed only to the advanced level.
Croatia is a wonderful country full of contrasts. There’s one that never seizes to amaze me, the one that is close to magic: few things seem to work but everything always get done. Also here’s logic to every madness.
Like this picture, people build sounds system to make things easier, and then people break systems for the same purpose: to make things easier. Systems that make daily life more manageable may at one point become self-aware.
Think of them as pressure zones: if you touch the right spot, the system speeds up, and before you know it – it runs smoothly. While for example, the anomaly of the British system is too much logic for its own good, the anomaly of the Croatian one is too much emotions. Croatian mentality is a system that feels, I think, and whose feelings need to be tended to. And this is where I love to live my current life.
The project “YOU are the EU” is funded by the Agency for Mobility and EU programmes withing the program European Solidarity Corps.