What Language Am I Even Speaking?

Believe it or not, daily communication is a necessary component to our lives. When I am in America, I never truly realize how important our language is. Having everything in English and having everyone speak perfect English is something that I take for granted in Nebraska. In the past 7 weeks, I have had to deal with Italian, Czech, Polish, German, and Hungarian. Thankfully, Europeans are more educated than Americans, and most can speak at least some English. 

It was a bit of a culture shock when we landed in Rome and saw mostly Italian everywhere. It wasn't something that I had really thought about or anticipated. We quickly learned our survival vocabulary, buon giorno means hello, grazie means thank you, and vino means wine. However, as I begin to travel more, I have learned my lesson and I try to go to new countries with this survival vocabulary already down (or I just download the language in Google Translate). 

I swear that right next to this said "Benvenuti a Roma", but we took a picture with the English version

Living in Olomouc has definitely been the largest language barrier. When we travel for our weekends, we usually go to more touristy destinations and the locals are accustomed to dumb Americans and speak English rather well. However, Olomouc is not very touristy and is significantly smaller. I have, many times, walked into shops or restaurants and immediately have to apologize because I don't speak Czech, and they don't speak any English. When we order our food at restaurants, we have adopted a "point and smile" technique where we choose something random off the menu and point at it and flash a smile at our Czech waiter. 

Learning the Czech language has been quite the experience for our group. We have language class about twice a week where our professor tried her very hardest to get some Czech to stick. So far, we have learned how to count to ten, how to order food (very basics at least), and basic greetings and pleasantries. In addition to learning vocabulary, we also have to learn how to pronounce each individual word. The Czech language doesn't use the Latin alphabet. There are a few letters that have special accents that changes the pronunciation of the letter. It's been quite the experience and I feel like I'm becoming at least a little more cultured. 

This is the Czech alphabet. The letters in pink are the unique ones that change pronunciation.

One major place that I really notice the language barriers is when I attend mass. Yes, Catholic mass is the same everywhere, but I still find myself saying the wrong responses at times and not following along as well as I should be. I try to look up the readings before I go so that I might have a chance during mass. However, I generally find myself spacing off during homilies because I simply can't follow. I didn't realize that I would miss English mass so much. 

One break that we got was when we went to the United Kingdom for spring break. It was refreshing to see signs and menus all in English. I even got to attend an Irish mass and witnessed a first communion in English. It was very difficult for us to come back and have to drastically slow our speech and go back to being the "dumb Americans". However, just the little break from a language barrier did us well and we were very grateful for our native vocabulary. 

"There are no language barriers when you are smiling" ~Allen Klein