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Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem
No, I haven’t been to a Czech restaurant, not yet. That will be in a couple of months from now. But I am preparing myself for it. Whenever I visit a foreign country, I always learn the language of that country. I have to keep up this good habit, otherwise “my reputation would be at stake and my fame would be shrewdly gored“, to paraphrase Achilles in Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida.
In a few months from now we will be visiting Prague, so I have started to study the Czech language…
The title of this entry, “Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem“, is a Czech saying and it means: “The more languages you know, the more times a person you are.” I think this is very true: One can only have real contact with people if one knows their language, even just a little bit of it.
(In Portugal and in Greece we were sometimes invited to party along with the restaurant owner and his family, in Japan I was the only one in our group who dared to ask for directions and got us the place we wanted to go…)
But I have already found out that this is not easy to do. Czech is a very difficult language to learn. In the past I have learned Croatian so I already know about the “č”, but that is long ago. And in Czech this inverted roof top (the háček) can be found on more consonants and even sometimes on vowels.
My knowledge of the Croatian language didn’t get a good reception from everyone when we went there in 1989. Yugoslavia had not been split up into several countries at the time yet. What did I know? I thought I had learned “Yugoslavian” 
…
We met a lady who absolutely refused to understand anything I said to her. The only reaction we got from her was: “Kroačk!!” She almost spat on the ground as she pronounced that word. With the knowledge I have now about the history of Yugoslavia I think I can understand the problem: She must have been a member of the Serb minority that was living in Croatia at the time. Even in those days Croatians and Serbs had difficulty to live together in peace. Lesson learned: The language you use may seem to reflect a political point of view.
A student advised us to go and see Sarajevo “now that it was still possible”. Unfortunately we didn’t do that.
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