A translator’s journey back to her childhood roots through Croatian

The gift of linguistic curiosity at fifty-eight

Helga’s relationship with languages began long before she became a professional translator and interpreter. Growing up bilingual with Slovenian and German, she was constantly surrounded by the musical cadences of what was then Serbo-Croatian during visits to her grandparents’ vineyard near Varaždin. “I was the little one from the Lesarjev vineyard,” she recalls, describing how she would walk from farm to farm, communicating with neighbours through a mixture of hand gestures, her native Slovenian, and the Croatian words she picked up along the way.

When her son Paul reached the age of 19 and began studying mechanical engineering, Helga decided it was time to focus on herself again. Already fluent in English, German, French, Russian, and Italian, she chose Croatian as her special birthday present – not for professional reasons, but for something much more profound. “It was a childhood wish,” she explains. “There was always something missing, something emotional and cultural in my family identity that I couldn’t grasp linguistically.”

Childhood memories wrapped in coastal flavours

For Helga, Croatian isn’t just a language – it’s a portal to sensory memories that shaped her understanding of warmth and belonging. Her first real encounters with Croatian came through food and music in her grandparents’ kitchen, where she learned to associate the language with the tastes and sounds of her extended family. “Croatian was always connected to the sea for me,” she reflects, “and I’m very drawn to coastal areas.”

The language carries the essence of summer holidays: grilled fish with a glass of Malvasia, chard and potatoes, and the beloved ćevapčići, traditional dishes that she still recreates in her Austrian kitchen. Her husband knows exactly how to make her happy on a Saturday morning – fresh burek from the local Croatian bakery and Croatian white bread, simple pleasures that transport her back to those formative years. Even now, she has a deep love for Croatian music from the 1950s and 60s, songs that echo the soundtrack of her youth spent with aunts and grandparents.

Breaking through the interference of familiar sounds

The challenge of learning Croatian was not vocabulary – Helga could understand almost everything from the start. The real struggle came from what linguists call “interference” – the way her native Slovenian and her knowledge of Russian kept pulling her away from Croatian’s distinct grammatical structures and pronunciation patterns. “Everything sounded familiar, but the structures were completely different,” she explains. “These are separate languages, and I had to learn to trust my first instincts rather than overthinking every grammatical choice.”

The breakthrough came about six months into her studies, when she stopped analysing every sentence structure and began speaking more freely. “I realised that when I trusted my first instinct, it worked better than when I questioned myself,” she says. The individual lessons proved crucial for someone with her linguistic background – group classes left her bored because the pace did not match her learning style, and she needed the flexibility to work through the specific challenges of untangling Croatian from her other Slavic languages.

Finding confidence through conversation and culture

The most surprising moments in Helga’s learning journey came during unannounced speaking assessments. Despite being someone who typically feels anxious about tests, she found that the spontaneous nature of these evaluations actually helped her perform better. “I didn’t have time to get nervous,” she laughs. “These assessments are just a snapshot for myself, but I could suddenly hear that I’d made massive progress in grammar, sentence structure, and especially pronunciation.”

This growing confidence opened new doors to Croatian culture. She began listening to podcasts and reading blogs, eventually progressing to books, starting with familiar titles she had already read in other languages before moving on to Croatian literature. Some libraries in Graz provide access to Croatian books, and she was delighted to discover how much she could understand. Her current challenge sits on her bedside table: “The Bridge on the Drina” by Ivo Andrić, a significant leap into serious Croatian literature.

The deeper reward of linguistic belonging

Learning Croatian has strengthened Helga’s relationships with Croatian friends who, despite speaking excellent English or German, now see her as truly “one of them.” But the most profound impact has been personal rather than professional. “The beautiful thing about Croatian is that I really wanted to learn this language purely for personal reasons,” she reflects. “People always say ‘you’re one of us’, and I wanted to live up to that.”

Her husband has become her most prominent supporter in this learning journey, regularly checking if she has completed her homework and encouraging her to push further with her studies. Beyond benefiting from having a personal interpreter, he actively nurtures her progress and celebrates her achievements. Their 20-year-old son, Paul, has also expressed interest in learning a Slavic language after completing his degree in engineering. For Helga, this represents the continuation of a multilingual family tradition – one that honours the complexity of identities that transcend national borders. Born as a Yugoslav, later becoming Slovenian, then Austrian, she has discovered that language learning is not just about communication – it is about understanding the cultural cosmos that shapes how we see ourselves and where we belong.