Czech

Czech is a very difficult language.  It is has all kinds of different sounds, entirely different vocabulary, and a very different grammar.  With Romance or German languages you can kind of make educated guesses about a lot of words because English has derived so many words from those different branches.  Since Czech is Slavic, though, it has very little in common with English and I got a chance to experience a little culture shock.

Moreover, Czech, like Latin, has all kinds of spelling variations for different declensions.  For instance, "one" can can be spelled "dva, dvě, dvou, dvěma, or dvo" depending on context and the kind of sentence.  I had hoped to memorize things like "pork" and  "tripe" so that I could have an idea about what kind of food I might be ordering but since the words can change pretty significantly, it became an exercise in figuring out the root, ignoring the rest, and guessing like crazy.

Even when you figure out a word, trying to say it correctly is pretty much entirely impossible.  Czech babies might be able to figure these things out but I sure couldn't.  Though to be fair, any language in which "z" and "v" are words is really just trying to be difficult.  Czech also has a lot of words without vowels.  Apparently, the way you sometimes say some of the consonants makes vowels unnecessary but that just seems to be making trouble.  I looked in a few different places and I found two different sentences which are entirely vowel free (they are tongue twisters so they don't make a whole lot of sense).

"Strč prst skrz krk" means "stick a finger through your neck" and

"Smrž pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh" means "a morel full of spots wetted from fogs"

Being indefatigable, though, I determined to learn some basic words to show my cosmopolitan nature and eagerness to be friendly. So I wrote out things like "prosim" (please), and "dekuji" (thank you) and "dobry den" (hello).  I worked on memorizing them and reviewed them on the plane over.  And I made point of thanking people in Czech when they gave me change, or handed me my room key, or held a door.

"Prosim," I would say, "prosim!"

It wasn't until about half way through my first day in Prague, when I looked up something else in my book, that I realized that I had mixed up my memorization somehow and had been responding to every little action with "please".