Our first intensive weekend Croatian course in Stuttgart

Our first intensive weekend course in Stuttgart took place on the 18th and 19th October.

It was intended for complete beginners and we organised it as an introduction to the language which would, hopefully, motivate students to want to learn more.

Saturday: Learning the Croatian basics

On Saturday, the five of us (four participants and myself) met at 9:00 in Café Merlin, a centrally located cultural centre, where we had organised a classroom for the weekend. After coffee and brief introductions, it was work time!

On the first day of the course the students learned to:

• Read and write the Croatian alphabet
• Introduce themselves and say where they're from
• Give their address and a telephone number
• Name all the objects in the classroom
• Define the gender of nouns
• Conjugate the verb “to be”

By the time we finished at 14:00 we'd been learning for 5 full hours and were all ready for a break ... still, the students remained impressively enthusiastic about learning more!

Sunday: Half team-building, half language lesson

We all met up at the same time on Sunday, but were greeted by an unpleasant surprise: the door to the classroom was locked and no-one was there to let us in!

Later it turned out to have been a huge misunderstanding (we were supposed to hold on to keys from Saturday), but at that morning, we were confused ... and somewhat stranded.

Luckily, all of the students turned out to be flexible, easy-going and creative so soon we came up with a solution – Eckart (and his wife) invited us all home to learn at their kitchen table! Manfred brought along some traditional Schwäbisch pretzels for everyone ...

... so less than half an hour after the initial shock, we were having coffee and breakfast, while naming everything we could see on the table and in Eckart’s lounge in Croatian. Soon we moved on to more challenging things, like:

• Naming rooms in the house and the furniture
• Learning adjectives to describe object and colours
• Learning how to create plural of the nouns

It could have been a very unpleasant experience, but thanks to our lovely Stuttgart students, I had a great weekend and really enjoyed teaching the course.

We hope to run a similar one soon – but this time we’ll try to stick to a classroom for the whole weekend ;-)