I started learning Albanian!
Yes, I know, I should probably rather learn Greek, now that I'm gonna be in Greece during winter ...
But I can't help it, I hopelessly fell in love with Albania!
In case you don't know (I actually didn't know before I went there ^^), Albania is a small country in South East Europe at the Mediterranian Sea, just North from Greece (there's a little map further down).
I've been there last year for three months and I all I wanna do is go back there and maybe even stay.
We had to leave in November, because winter was setting in and without a heater in the van we thought it would be smart to move as far south as we could get by car.
So Greece it was and it was a good decision.
But as soon as it is warm enough we are gonna be on our way back up North.
Many of the younger people in Albania do speak English (or even German) but I would love to be able to talk also to the older people from the villages, like that friendly shepherd that we once met, and listen to their stories.
So to be prepared (and because I love learning languages) I started learning Albanian about two months ago :)
It's not that easy to find good sources on the internet, Albanian is not the most common language to learn ^^
But I've found an app called LING that was quite a good start. It is a bit like DuoLingo (one of the more popular language learning apps) with little dialogues and sentences you have to complete or translate.
The only problem is that you only get two lessons for free. 5$ per month isn't that much though, but I'm a street musician and I don't have a bank account anymore ^^
My other source of learning material is a YouTube channel called "Learn Albanian Online" which offers a lot of free content.
I found that the best way to learn a language is to surround myself with it whenever possible.
It doesn't matter where you start, just start somewhere.
So until I'm back in Albania and get the opportunity to really talk and listen to native speakers from face to face, I just work my way through the videos, try to remember as much as possible and listen to audio lessons to get used to the sound of the language.
I'm just absorbing everything I can get my hands on.
Before I go to bed I usually read through my notes again, because I found out that in the morning I still know most of them!
To take full advantage of this magical thing my brain seems to do while I'm sleeping, I sometimes even put on one of the lessons and listen to it while I'm drifting into dreamland.
Albanian is such an interesting language to study and I'd love to learn more about its evolving and its connection to other languages!
From what I've seen so far it's similar to German (my own language) in its grammatical complexity, with all its declinations and conjugations.
Some words are similar to the vocabulary of other languages I came across over the time (English, French, Portuguese, Serbian, Italian), but most of them are completely different and sometimes a challenge to pronounce ^^
But that makes it so fascinating for me and really fun to learn! It's really something new!
And even if Life should decide to settle us down somewhere else and I never get to use all that I've learned I definitely had a good time :)
(and I will visit Albania again someday, come what may!)
picture of the flag taken from wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albania) and edited by me
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