Uncles and Aunties

Image Source

Bosnian has a complicated set of words for uncle and aunt. There are different words for your father's brother (stric, unless you're Muslim, in which case it's amidža), your mother's brother (ujak, unless you're Muslim, in which case it's daidža),  and yet another word for the spouse of one your parents' siblings (tetak).

You also use the word differently in Bosnian. In Bosnian you don't append a first name to the title. So, when you spoke to your uncle you might address him as Stric but never as Stric Darko. I had a hard time figuring out how this would work out in real life (not call my Uncle Paul "Uncle Paul"?!) until I realized it's the same way we use the titles "Grandma" and "Grandpa" in English: we rarely append a first name to them; we simply use the title by itself to address the family member.

There is one exception to that rule. If you are talking to an adult you are not related to and want to show them respect but using the formal equivalent of "Mr." or "Mrs." would be too stiff, you call them Čiko or Teta along with their first name. So our landlady taught our children to call her Teta Fatima when we lived here before. It's a lovely tradition, kind of like "Don" or "Doña" in Spanish. The closest English equivalents I can think of are the Hawaiian use of "Aunty" as an honorific and the Southern use of "Miss" before a grown-up woman's first name.

We'd love to have you for dinner.

Image Source

 A man walks down the street holding a lobster. 

"What you doing?" his friend asks. 

"I'm going to have the lobster for lunch." 

The lobster pipes up, "No thanks. I've already eaten.

This joke does not work in Bosnian because you use one preposition, za, if something is going to be lunch and a different preposition, na, if someone (or something) is joining you for lunch.

Prepositions are hard for us to remember and get right. We convulse our tutor in laughter as we tell her, in Bosnian, about having guests za dinner.

I only wish, when we were having guests na dinner, that we were in Phoenix and could get dessert from  the bakery where our niece works. 

Mustaches

In Bosnian, this is "brkovi," or mustache.

This is "brk."

That half-smile you can't suppress when you're trying to be serious is also called "brk."

Change

One of the coolest things about learning a new language is discovering distinctions that English doesn't make. After a confusing conversation with our tutor about money, we realized we had stumbled upon one. In English, "getting change" means either a cashier giving you the difference between what you paid and what you owed OR the act of exchanging one piece of money for smaller denominations.

In Bosnian, they are two separate words. What a cashier gives you back after you've bought something is kusor.

A produce vendor looks for kusor.

The smaller bills or coins that replace a bigger one are sitno.

words for putting on and taking off footwear

In English, we put on or take off our clothes AND our shoes.
In Bosnian, though, I


obučem (put on)
or
skinem (take off)
clothes

while I

obujem (put on)
or
izujem se (take off)
shoes.

Rat Zvijezda

Add caption

A local movie theater did a one-night showing of the original Star Wars movie. We of course went.

It was a very, very old copy, with lots of scratches and splices that cut whole sections of scenes, but it was a fun crowd to watch the movie with. Everyone there obviously knew it very well.

I was surprised when an anticipatory hush descended over the crowd when Luke Skywalker first appears. Everyone seemed to be leaning forward in their seats until his aunt called to him, the first time we hear his name in the movie. She calls, "Luke!"

And everyone in the theater erupted in laughter. "Luk" means onion in Bosnian.

(I found this image, apparently of a Serbian Star Wars poster, at http://www.tar.hu/szpray/elef/index_files/01.htm.)

Bosnian vocabulary lesson

In Bosnian, there are two ways to say "jeans":

farmerke


or

Texas pantalone.

abeceda puzzle

It doesn't fit the "ABC" song very well.

Spinach for breakfast

I suspect the rest of the world already figured this out while I was doing something else. Spinach for breakfast!

I tried some different recipes online and eventually came up with a green smoothie we like: 1 c. pineapple juice, 1 c. pineapple, 1 frozen banana (the banana didn't make it into the photo), 2 c. packed spinach leaves. Puree with the hand blender David gave me for Christmas (oh, how I've missed our hand blender...).

Christened: Popeye Punch.

Which goes well with the Bosnian Popeye videos we've been watching to work on our language. So maybe it's actually Popaj Punch.

Learning to Read, bilingually

Eleanor has learned how to read this year. To my surprise, she has seamlessly learned to read not just in English but also in Bosnian. When she reads words, she doesn't automatically assume the English pronunciation, either, like the rest of us in the family do. The other day we were making sandwiches with part of our precious American peanut butter stash, and she asked, "Why is it called Yeef?"

Mitten

A winter word I learned:

Rukavica s jednim prstom: glove with one finger

Conjugation Machines

Why machines? Because conjugation is a mechanical process in any language.

Isaac's machine is Lego. He continued to improve it over several days, but even the earliest prototype showed a sophisticated understanding of conjugation.

The first of these four levers shows whether the subject is singular or plural. The other three represent first person, second person, and third person.

Eleanor's machine wasn't as sophisticated.

You say the word you want to conjugate into the cone and then it gives you a piece of paper with the correct conjugation written on it (remarkably, in Eleanor’s handwriting!). 

We played lots of games with these conjugation machines. Most recently, I gave them complete sentences in English and asked them to give me the Bosnian translation. Isaac had already broken apart his machine to use on other Lego projects, so he did it like a worksheet. Perfectly. He doesn’t need his conjugation machine anymore.

Eleanor, though, pulled her machine out and opened her Conjugation Store. She even made a sign for the store (note that the "sh" sound is represented by the Bosnian letter that makes that sound--š).

As the customer, I gave her each of the sentences and she laboriously cranked out the translation. Once, she translated the sentence perfectly except that she left the Bosnian verb in the infinitive form. I asked, pointing to the verb, “Is this the way you say it?”

Eleanor looked at it and then took it back from me. “Oh,” she said ruefully, “a plug must have come undone. Let me fix it.” She worked on her machine for a while, rewrote the sentence, and handed it to me. “These machines are hard to keep working,” she told me.

I still don’t hear Isaac and Eleanor initiating conversation much. But Eleanor answered a direct question from the store clerk yesterday when we were shopping, and every meal now we all have to say at least one sentence with a conjugated verb.

It’s a start.

Conjugation with Scissors and Tape

Once they had those verb endings running around in their heads, I showed them, using a card with the infinitive form of a verb written on it and a pair of scissors, how you take off the infinitive ending

and put in its place one of the endings we had been singing. We spent a day doing a lot of cutting and pasting, or rather cutting and taping.

But, of course, cutting up a card isn’t the same as producing a conjugated verb in conversation.

Tomorrow is the final conjugation post.

Conjugation: Singing grammar

I don’t want Bosnian to be boring, but we do, in fact, need to learn by rote verb endings if we ever want to conjugate verbs. So I made up a song with a singsong melody--better to annoy them than to bore them!. The song consists wholly of pronouns and their matching verb endings. Here are the (witty! sparkling! unforgettable!) lyrics:

Ja -im

Ti -iš

On/ona -i

Mi -imo

Vi -ite

Oni/one -e

Then I started to sing it. All the time. Walking to school. Setting the table. Playing with Lego. Washing their hair.  When they started begging me to quit, I told them I would if they’d sing it to me once without any help. Isaac did it perfectly the first time he tried. (And then I had a hard time quitting, it was such a habit.)

Conjugation: Bosnian as a Second Language

Isaac and Eleanor are slowly learning Bosnian as they listen to it every day at school, but we decided they need more instruction to make quicker progress. Unfortunately, the school don't offer the equivalent of English as a Second Language program, and we haven't found any Bosnian teachers with experience teaching children.

       
So I decided that I need to create my own Bosnian as a Second Language support program for them. This is a bit tricky since, ahem, I don’t speak Bosnian. (Well, not much better than Isaac and Eleanor, anyway.)

       
Isaac and Eleanor know lots of nouns in Bosnian, but they haven’t taken the leap into speaking in sentences. So focusing on verb conjugations is a high yield endeavor: with just a bit of effort, they’d dramatically increase their ability to speak as well as their ability to understand. But how do you teach a five year old and a seven year old to conjugate verbs?

This turned into a l-o-o-o-o-o-ng post (who knew I had so much to say about conjugation?), so I’ve split it into three parts. I'd love, though, to hear any other suggestions for effective strategies to teach a new language to small children.

The...the...uh...uh

There is no definite or indefinite article in Bosnian (or, I think, in any Slavic language)—no “the” or “a.” When I first learned this, it boggled my mind. How can you communicate without articles? In practice, though, I’m amazed at how seldom I miss them.

It does mean, however, that Bosnians have a hard time figuring out when to use articles. David bought this notebook for Isaac to use in his math class, and we were all amused at the use of the definite article.





But then I tried to figure out why it’s wrong. I have no idea, actually. Emma Lucy’s guess is the best I’ve heard so far: “space” is a mass noun (one that you can’t count) so you don’t use an article, while “universe” is a countable noun, so it does take the article. Any thoughts?

Makes me glad I learned English as a baby and didn’t have to figure out some rule for using articles on my own.

Oxymorons in Montenegro

I forgot to post one final photo from our trip to Montenegro: graffiti in Cyrillic script! And an interesting anti-graffiti strategy; everywhere I saw graffiti, it had been lined out, presumably by official anti-graffiti workers, but you could still read it just fine. Well, if you can read Cyrillic script, which I can't. I had David check it to make sure it wasn't vulgar. 

He says it reads: Our biggest problem is our strength.

Grb

A first: Isaac learned a Bosnian word before he knew the English term!

Thanksgiving Day also happened to be State Day for Bosnia this year. To prepare, Isaac’s class studied national emblems, like the Bosnian flag. He came home and asked us what a coat of arms is. “I know what the Bosnian grb looks like, but I don’t know what it’s for. Miss Selma looked it up for me in English, but she said it’s a coat of arms, and I don’t know what that is.”

(...and if you're wondering, you pronounce it just like it looks---say every consonant sound, one after another)

There are great juice flavors here. I love pear nectar, but the label's English translation made it sound less than appetizing.



Good thing I'd already enjoyed my juice before I read it!

But what if you really ARE tired?

The basic greetings I know how to use:

Dobar dan. (Good day. My all-purpose, pass-you-in-the-street greeting.)

Zdravo. (Hi, though literally it means, Health.)

David learned a new greeting this week when he got in a taxi and a taxi driver said, "Imali umoran? (Are you tired?)"

David's Bosnian companion started laughing. "That's just one of those strange ways we in Bosnia greet each other."

So later, David tried it out on someone.

The polite answer, apparently, is, "Ne (no)."