Thursday, January 20, 2011

Welcome - Mirë se vini

I just completed Lesson 1 Pimsleuer - Albanian and it's safe to say that I remember nothing. This is truly a foreign language to me. Throughout high school I took Spanish classes and struggled with it but we all had a few buzz words under our belt, you know: quesadilla, burrito, torilla, taco, salsa, gordita, chalupa...the list goes on. At Fairfield I took several semesters of Mandarin but with a background in Cantonese, it wasn't so hard for me. I'm just beginning to realize how brave my classmates were.

I won't complain too much because Shqip uses the Roman alphabet. There's only a couple letters that are different from English and the pronunciation is slightly different as well.

So I was supposed to learn how to say "thank you" but that's too difficult (Faleminderit). Instead I've memorized two words.
Just don't ask me how to pronounce either.

4 comments:

  1. LAME!! How are you supposed to speak Albanian if you won't even jump into it!?! Get the Rosetta Stone and do it to it! I'm disappointed in you, Alex....

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  2. I apologize for your dissatisfaction, Maggie. Trust me, I'll "jump into it" when I'm in country. Rosetta Stone doesn't cover Shqip.

    Don't read this as if I'm going to stop trying to learn the language. I'm going to continue.

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  3. I like how all your Spanish buzzwords are food related :D

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