New Chapter TLV

Languages, language barriers and “false friends”

Looking back, I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t learning a foreign language.

I started going to an English kindergarten at the age of 4. At the age of 6 I added German lessons to my schedule and in high school Italian, Latin and ancient Greek. Since I stuck to German for 9 years, I can still hold a conversation, speak and understand it, however my Italian is very basic, whatever remains of my Latin is restricted to some proverbs and odd Cicero and Vergil quotations and my Greek is purely down to the alphabet itself (not that I can understand modern Greek, but at least I can read it ).

Since my generation still learned to read and write in the Cyrillic script in elementary school, after I started learning Hebrew last year I realized that though my list of languages I speak is not as impressive as that of some of my friends (Satu, you’re my hero!) I can actually read and write in 4 different alphabets!

So, since I really enjoy learning languages (even only a few words), I loved being in an environment like Google where you’re exposed to so many languages around you all the time and can discover some surprising and funny “false friends” along the way…
It’s during my time in Ireland that I learned (among other things) the following:
• “Pula” (Croatian city) means “dick” in Romanian
• “Bok” (Croatian word for “hello”) means “shit” in Turkish
• “Buba” (Croatian word for “bug”) means “doll” in Hebrew
• “Mami” when used in Hebrew has nothing to do with mothers, it means “sweetie”
• In Hebrew “kuku” means “ponytail” (in Croatian it’s an onomatopoeic sound) and “poni” means “fringe” (in Croatian it means, surprisingly enough , “pony”), so explaining your new haircut can get pretty confusing, especially at the stage when you’re still mixing your languages a lot.

Not really falling under the “false friends” category, but a surprising discovery to me nonetheless was the fact that Israelis pronounce (and, of course, use) some words exactly the same way as Croatians do: e.g. televizija, koalicija, opozicija, tehnologija… I still find it funny to listen to a quick flow of Hebrew with a few familiar words thrown in the middle!

Since my move to Tel Aviv, I’ve been faced for the first time with living in a country where I encountered the language barrier every step of the way. To their credit, Israelis have road signs in both Hebrew and English, lots of restaurants will have English menus and some of the products in shops might have English or Russian declarations, which was extremely helpful in the very beginning.

Learning Hebrew is not an easy task for quite a few reasons – new script, right to left writing, grammar and vocabulary that have (almost) no connection to any other language I’ve been exposed to so far… It was quite frustrating in the beginning. Since October 2010 I’ve been learning it 4 days a week for 4 hours a day in Ulpan Gordon and I still get a surge of pride when I can do something as simple as read the Hebrew menu in a restaurant and communicate with waiters only in Hebrew or give directions to someone in the street in Hebrew… I still have a long way to go before actually being fluent, but I’m motivated and positive that some day I’ll get there!

In the meantime, I still keep entertaining myself by discovering more “false friends” between Hebrew/Arabic and Croatian and it’s always amusing… Some of my new discoveries are:
• “Kmica” (Croatian kajkavian dialect word for “darkness”) means “ring finger” in Hebrew
• “Zub” (Croatian word for “tooth”) means “dick” in Arabic
• “Noga” (Croatian word for “leg”) is a Hebrew girls’ name meaning “brightness, glow”

But one of my favorite discoveries is this cute fruit drink “Mogu Mogu” (lychee or mango flavor) which in Croatian literally translates into “I can, I can”.