Two years ago, I lived in South Korea. My neighborhood did not have a lot of people who looked like me and I got stared at a lot! Sometimes, this made me uncomfortable. So, when I was living in Kosovo last year, I wanted to blend in as much as possible. This was easy because there are a lot more people who look like me but I was frequently mistaken for a local Albanian! Locals would walk up to me and start speaking rapid Albanian. I had to interrupt and ask them if they spoke English becuase I could not understand what they were saying!
In order to blend in, I took Albanian language classes and discovered that it's much harder than it looks! Albanian is known as a “language isolate”, which means there aren’t any other languages related to it. In contrast, Spanish has a lot in common with French, Italian and other romance languages. Albanian doesn’t have any close buddies like that.
Luckily, I love to learn languages because I grew up speaking English and Spanish at home, so I was determined to become fluent in Albanian. Do you speak any other languages? Every Monday and Wednesday, three friends and I took a beginner Albanian language class at the Prishtina School of Languages. They teach tons of languages there!
