Czech Class

One of the problems with academia is that finding a class which is useful and applicable in your immediate, everday life is about as common as finding Rush Limbaugh at an NAACP meeting. Now I’m not out to knock classes. Classes are interesting, sure; informative, often; important, definitely. But how many times have you learned something in the morning and then turned around and used it to your advantage that very same day? That’s what I thought. But if you come to Prague and study Czech, I guarantee this will happen. Every day. Many times. Many times every day. I’m not gonna lie; you’re not going to be fluent in Czech in one or even two semesters. But that doesn’t mean that it will not make your time here exponentially better. People will respond to you if you try to speak their language to them; your accent might be horrible and your vocabulary limited and your grammar ridiculous, but people will respond to the attempt, not the result. If you want to experience the culture, you must talk to the people: bartenders, waitresses, high-schoolers, your teachers. And if they see that you are trying to communicate, they will try too. At the local bar or the biggest club in central Europe, you will meet more people and learn more things if you speak the language, even a little bit. And the more you speak, the better you will be at speaking, the more people you will meet and the more things you will learn and the better you will be at speaking and on and on until infinity.

If you want to come to Prague to get drunk with a bunch of English-speaking peoples, well, that’s your perogative. You will definitely find plenty of drunks and plenty of English speakers. You’ll discover the ex-pat bars and the touristy restaurants. You’ll hear crazy stories of adventures throughout Europe. You’ll meet people from your hometown and talk about mutual people that you know. And it will be fun. But in the end, coming to Prague and not learning the language is like going to Peter Luger’s and ordering a salad. Sure, it will be good, and you will probably be satisfied. But you’ll never know how much you are missing.