How's my Croatian? It depends....

Yesterday was a good day for me, language-wise: I got three compliments on my Croatian! One of them was especially exciting because it came from the woman who translates the documents for my visa, so she's fluent in several languages and knows what she's talking about.

But when people back home would ask "How's your Croatian?"  or "Do you speak the language there?"  I'm not sure how to answer.  I really struggle to put sentences together.  The words are hard to pronounce: too many consonants.  Like the word for "luggage": prtljaga.  or "patient": "strpljiv."  I know exactly what those words mean when I hear, read, or write them, but speaking them is another matter altogether!  Plus the case endings are hard to get straight at a normal conversation speed.  On a test, I could write out the proper case ending for a noun after the number "four," but saying it...I'm still a bit too slow!  :)

Sometimes  I understand exactly what someone is saying.  Yesterday our new landlady was telling Kristian about how our little house had belonged to her parents, but then her father died in 2000.  The real estate agent had estimated the value of the house at 350,000 euros.  (No, it's no mansion. it's more like maybe the size of a tool shed behind a mansion.  But it has a huge yard in a desirable location, so the land itself is valuable).

I understood all that, but I also heard her talking about dogs, and I figured she was saying something about pets in the house, but I didn't understand any of the words.  Turns out she was telling Kristian that she and her husband own a metal factory that went through a huge boom for a while because they were making ID tags for dogs.  Then the government started requiring dogs to have microchips, so no one was buying ID tags, and their business really suffered.  My vocabulary is pretty minimal as it is, and "microchip implantation" has not really ever come up before, so I was lost.

My language abilities, then, are pretty hit-or-miss...but I am getting there!  I can't even imagine what it will be like to be fluent, but I look forward to that day!