From silent guest to Croatian speaker

The moment everything changed

Marina had experienced the feeling countless times before – sitting at family gatherings in Dalmatia, understanding fragments of conversation whilst her husband chatted easily with relatives. She knew the topics from context, could pick out familiar words, but when someone addressed her directly, her Croatian vocabulary rarely stretched beyond “Kako si?” and “Ja sam gladna”. The latter, she notes with a laugh, being particularly essential in Croatia.

The turning point came last year after visiting her husband’s cousin. “I decided that very evening – I’m signing up for this course,” she recalls. It wasn’t a dramatic revelation, just the accumulation of too many moments feeling like an outsider in her own extended family. Her husband’s response was supportive but measured: “Yes, try it out. Why not? It’ll be interesting.” She didn’t tell the rest of his family straight away. She wanted to avoid creating expectations she might not fulfil.

Teaching teenagers whilst learning like one

Working with 16 to 20-year-olds in vocational education means Marina understands the psychology of learning better than most. She teaches electrotechnology and mathematics, subjects built on rules and structures – precisely the framework she craves when learning Croatian. “I’m someone who really likes structure and rules,” she explains. “Even if I don’t apply it perfectly, knowing why a word ends with a particular letter makes me feel more secure.”

Her teaching experience gave her an unexpected advantage during her teacher training in Munich, where many students came from the former Yugoslavia. They assumed Croatian would be their secret classroom language. “The first thing you pick up are the swear words,” Marina says. When one slipped out during class, she calmly reminded them: no swear words, not even in other languages. One student turned to another and muttered that the teacher didn’t understand anyway. “I turned around and said, ‘Actually, I understand perfectly well.’” The students’ surprise quickly turned to interest – suddenly, their teacher wasn’t just someone who enforced rules but someone who genuinely understood what it meant to navigate between languages.

When structure meets reality

Marina’s first impression of Croatian was straightforward: complicated. The grammar felt dense, the cases overwhelming. She bought a book and cycled between overambition – tackling too much at once – and months of neglect. Without structure, her natural perfectionism worked against her. “I’m very perfectionistic, which is why I still have problems daring to say something, because it might be wrong,” she admits. It’s the barrier she’s still working to overcome.

Yet there have been genuine breakthroughs. During one lesson, she wrote an extensive text about a room to practise the locative case – “I probably overdid it a bit,” she concedes. Two phrases sounded odd to her as she wrote them. When her teacher Luna reviewed the text, those were exactly the two mistakes. “So there’s slowly developing a bit of a feeling for it,” Marina reflects. Sometimes that feeling misleads her – the past tense of “to eat” sounded wrong but wasn’t – but the foundation is being laid. Words occasionally reveal themselves through pronunciation: when she encountered “croissant” in Croatian, she thought, “Well, of course.”

Finding connection through complexity

The relationship with her mother-in-law has deepened through an unexpected channel: linguistic curiosity. Marina now writes WhatsApp messages in Croatian – admittedly with occasional help from Google Translate – and the exchange has given them new ground for connection. When Marina wanted to understand extended family relationships beyond the immediate relatives covered in class, she sent her mother-in-law a list of 16 different relationship combinations. “She wrote back with a proper list: this is called this, and this is called that.”

Working with Luna, who teaches from Zadar, has revealed another layer of linguistic complexity. Marina now collects vocabulary variations: Bosnian terms from her mother-in-law, standard Croatian from lessons, Dalmatian dialect from family visits. “I’ve got words now where three different things mean the same thing,” she explains. There’s “gaće” – trousers in Dalmatia but underwear elsewhere. There are tomatoes and shoelaces, each with their regional variations. She’ll probably never apply these distinctions reliably, she admits, but that’s not really the point. The exchange itself matters.

Progress measured in courage, not perfection

The individual lessons provide something Marina couldn’t achieve alone: accountability without rigidity. When teaching is demanding, she does slightly less; during school holidays, she pushes further. But the commitment remains constant. Crucially, Luna keeps most exercises oral, only assigning written homework. “For me, it’s significantly more speaking than before in group classes,” Marina notes. It’s forcing her past the perfectionism that makes her hesitate.

Croatian phrases now appear naturally in conversations with her husband – single sentences rather than flowing dialogue, but it’s a start. Ironically, the year she finally gained some capability was the first year they didn’t holiday in Croatia, though she’s confident they’ll return. Her husband’s family has responded with encouragement, occasionally joking that Marina will eventually speak better Croatian than they do – she considers this highly unlikely. But when she delves into grammatical structures they use instinctively, they sometimes can’t explain their own language. “It’s quite entertaining,” she says. Her advice for beginners reflects her teaching philosophy: don’t be put off by initial complexity, learn your vocabulary, and find enjoyment in the process. The grammar will follow.