Earthquake!

Or at least I think so.. There's no news about it this morning but at about 3.45am the building was definitely shaking violently.. It could have been a dream I suppose cause I also recall Bikey telling me it was 5.6 on the Richter scale but I assume that was once I'd gone back to sleep (I typed school because my brain is telling me to eat breakfast and leave the house instead of typing) There was an earthquake earlier in the day when I visited djermana's interpreting/ language school. My dastardly good fortune continues: she has offered an exchange of Bosnian language lessons for advice on English language learning resources on my side. I'm definitely getting the better end of this deal..

Unfortunately my timetable means I have to take the advanced course rather than beginners and, if last night's session is any indicator, I am way out of my depth. It seemed like the teacher had to cater to 4 students with completely different levels- the first a Brazilian who I thought was a native with a non-standard dialect, then a dude from Arizona who said he'd been learning the language for a year 'for no particularly good reason'- he was also unimpressed with the Ronelle Alexander textbook I had but it's definitely better than any other options so what can I do? The next student was a girl who had been studying in Sarajevo for a month and was probably feeling almost as frustrated as I was but seemed like a patient type. And then there was me, two weeks in the country, first lesson. All in the advanced class together! The class began with some insane family tree with in laws, step families and halfchildren sprinkled about until I'd be at a loss to explain the relationship in English- especially cause they do the whole labelling everyone differently on the maternal and paternal side. The teacher then kindly brought the level of the lesson down for me and did a nice basic family tree.

I spent Saturday gadding about from Mrs N's to Djermana's to spending the blackout of Earth Hour wandering the streets with Suada. I'd only met her once before but it didn't seem like it- she's a fellow linguist and we spent two hours non stop geekily breaking down Bosnian, English, Spanish and German grammatical semantics- not just how definiteness is conveyed in Bosnian but why it's done in this way, the philosophy behind adjective order, compound nouns, collocations and culture.. Good times :)

ps. Mrs N's daughter lent me her Bosnian 1984 and after unsuccessfully attempting to read it, I discovered an English copy in the house last night! Rock n' Roll!

(edited to correct a couple of minor injustices)