But it's good for you.

On a daily basis I find myself insanely jealous of my students. They move back and forth between Bulgarian and English fairly seamlessly. My classroom is an English only "zone" and for the most parts kids respect this. It's interesting: I know when my kids slip into Bulgarian because the registrar changes and my kids know when I am listening to them because mid-sentence they'll switch back to English. While I am amazed by my kids fluency in English at a relatively young age what I'm insanely jealous of is their ability to move between the two languages without much effort.

My Bulgarian (and even today, my German) hoovers at the margins of my consciousness and it's only with great effort that I can drag enough Bulgarian out to have a conversation. And of course, as it's coming out of my mouth I hear the crazy coming out. I can't always be bothered to conjugate verbs correctly or use the correct tense because while I'm in the middle of trying to conjugate a given verb I am already thinking of what's coming next in the sentence.  The worst is when I realize that I am half way into a sentence and I don't have a big enough vocabulary to actually say what I want to. Or when I bump into German word.

I hate bumping into German because when this happens it's hard for me to right myself and get back to Bulgarian.  The "German-problem" happens much less frequently these days.  I am not sure if that's a good think or a bad thing.

Anyhow back to Bulgarian.  In my daily life my Bulgarian can be broken down into to two pieces: rote-scripted Bulgarian and free-form Bulgarian. <!--more-->Scripted Bulgarian is the Bulgarian that you need to get around--ordering coffee, buying lunch, taking a taxi, going grocery shopping. Basically, you get to say the same thing every time and you more or less know exactly what the other person will say to you.  Now don't get me wrong, this is important Bulgarian to know but it's generally contained within the parameters of the exchange at hand. The coffee. The cost of the groceries. The place that you want to go.

Then there's the free-form Bulgarian which is much more challenging. It's the Bulgarian that I hear my kids speaking at lunch, the Bulgarian I need to use at a party, the Bulgarian I need to communicate with the cleaning woman at work or the Bulgarian I use with my the children of my colleagues. This Bulgarian is of course unscripted and doesn't have as clear parameters as my regular exchanges. The result is that I can't always keep up with the direction of the conversation nor can I can reliably keep up my half of a conversation.

So when I know I am going to be in one of these situations, I often think about what topics I could talk about. I think about the vocabulary I might need and I think about what kinds of questions I could ask people. I do this because it makes me less nervous to speak Bulgarian. Does it work? I don't know. Frankly, I guess it doesn't matter because it makes me feel better.

Last week I was thinking about this and what kinds of things I could talk about at the <a href="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/2011/06/09/blogs-beer-and-bulgaria/" target="_blank">blog meet-up event</a> in Bulgarian and that's when I realized that the only words I know about computers/the internet/blogging are English words with a similar Bulgarian pronunciation. I was totally okay with this realization. It was the one that followed that I disliked.

I thought: <em>Huna</em>. The words I use the most are all similar to their English counterpart. Enter: coffee and кафе (kafe), tomatoes and домати (domati), bus and автобус (aftobus), scarf and шал (shal), to read and чета (cheta), to make and правя (pravya). Only by the time I got to the verbs did I realize: I am nuts. The Bulgarian verbs are actually in no way shape or form related to the English verbs. I've just used the words so much that I've matched them up with their English language counterpart and now they come without thinking too much about it leading me to think they are they same when they aren't.

So there you have it: when you stop to think about it, minds are amazing. And learning a language is hard work but worth it.