August the 1st, 2024 – People learn languages in different ways. And if you’re learning standard Croatian, learning in a cafe on a Dalmatian island is not the way. Meet the dialect killers.
Some people have a natural ability to learn languages. They can pick them up naturally in no time at all.
And then there are those who find a great teacher or language school.
And then there are those who think that they can pick up the language by chatting to locals in a cafe on a Dalmatian island. Let me be the first to tell you that learning Croatian in a Dalmatian cafe setting probably won’t render you very useful anywhere else other than on that said Dalmatian island, and maybe even anywhere else than that particular cafe.
I spoke fluent Russian, so I had conquered the fear of Slavic grammar. That is what is typically the biggest hurdle for most learners of any Slavic language. Coming from Somalia to Hvar, I did not have any exposure to standard Croatian on the mainland, and I rather naively thought that the language I was picking up in the local cafe in Jelsa was actually Croatian.
How wrong I was!
And far from having a great teacher, I had managed to find the most unintelligible speaker of any language as my prime source of learning Croatian – on a Dalmatian island.
If you think Croatian all sounds the same, you’d be sadly mistaken. The sheer number of dialects spoken across this geographically small country is astounding. Watch the video above and see how the iconic Dalmatian grunt and Jelsa dialect went from a couple of fun videos to get us through the boredom of winter, to my teacher – Professor Frank John Dubokovich, Guardian of the Hvar Dialects – starring on a British reality TV show.
