Albania

This is totally random, but whenever someone asked me what Albanian sounded like, to me it always sounded like English, French, and Russian, and maybe a little bit of Spanish combined and then played backwards. That's always what it sounded like to me.

The Albanian language is pretty difficult, I won't lie, but it's definitely something that you absolutely can master. Start by just learning a bunch of vocab. Just learn tons of nouns and learn some of your basic verbs and know how to conjugate those verbs and you'll be able to just throw stuff together. Don't really worry about much else in the beginning. You'll be amazed with how quickly it comes when you really work hard, you take it seriously, and of course you absolutely rely on the Lord.

So, apparently, Albanian does not, the language does not belong to any other language tree. For example, you have Germanic languages, you have Romantic languages. Albanian has its own type of language. Apparently it's like an Indo-European language. So if anyone asks, like, oh, is Albanian like any other language, like Russian or Italian? The answer is not really. But Albanian, they do use words from other languages, like Turkish and sometimes Italian and things like that.

Albanians really, really love when you learn their idioms and their phrases and those things like those old adages that they have in Albania. They really, really love to hear Americans saying those. They just go crazy. So, learn as many of those as you can and use them.

Salbanian is absolutely beautiful, but it is difficult at times. For me, what worked best was learning the patterns. Salbanian is super awesome because it's not like English because it has grammar rules and it's going to follow those. So my advice would be obviously learning the words, but learning the different grammar principles and how to conjugate the verbs and the adjectives and the nouns, and then just talk a lot. For me, that was how I learned. I used the grammar that I learned, but then just talking, making mistakes, and not getting tripped up by it.

I'm just gonna say the language looks crazy and Albanians are actually really forgiving. They think if you can even say hello in Albanian and you're an American or some other nationality, they think it's amazing. So don't stress out about the language and just be diligent and hard-working.

I think Albanian is one of the coolest languages. You're going to realize how much you may not know about your own language when you're learning about Albanian because there's a lot of conjugations and I don't even know how to describe it. But my one tip is to use it. Open your mouth and just start talking. Whether it makes sense to you or if people give you weird looks, don't care about it because as you open your mouth you're going to learn what's working what's not working.

Today's tip is how to say L and L correctly. So, the L with one L is very important to say, because if you don't say the L correctly, you'll just be saying other words that have the L, the two Ls in them. So, we Americans, we say the L with a heavy L, the two Ls, that's our traditional way. That's when you put your tongue at the front of your teeth. But to say the L with one L, the Albanian way, you put the tip of your tongue at the roof of your mouth. And that's the difference between, like, dial, devil, and dial, boy. So, dialje vogel, instead of dialje vogel, which doesn't make sense.

My advice for learning the language is to use it. To use it, use it, use it. The more you use it, together with regular language study and continually improving, that's how you're gonna learn it. Because there will come a point where you can speak Albanian just like I'm speaking English. And you might even get to a point where you're like, I can't remember this word in English because you only know it in Albanian. Use it, use it, use it. Use your language. I had a native companion who said, we're in Albania, we're gonna speak Albanian. That's what he said, and that's what we did.