Things Just Don't Translate

Translations, translations, translations. They can't be explained too easily. Let's take "my name is" in Slovak. You would say it like this, "Volam sa". I you translate this back to English literally, it would be, "I call myself" If your asking someone age you would say, "kolko maš rokov?" or "How many years do you have?" Words like grandmother or grandfather are translated to "old mother" and "old father". The word "auto" means car, so what does "autobus" mean. Bus! Some improper English is proper in Slovak. "Ja nikdy nemam nič" means, "I never don't have nothing". Double negatives are proper Slovak. You can sometimes have triple, quadruple, or more negatives. The word for light in Slovak also means easy. My Slovak teacher once told me to do something and said, "It is light, is it not?" Slovaks would not say, "Do you like it?", they say "Do you have like it". That was odd to hear the first time I was in Slovakia. So if you ever learn a foreighn language, don't expect literal translations all the time.

Deutsch-English

Having a German student in my class I find that if my my predictions are correct, (and this could be a rather obvious statement for some history people) German came out of English or English came out of German. I think this because I have heard words like "unt, nacht, schwimmen, winter, mann, butter, bier, or wetter. These words translated means, (in order of listing above) and, night, swim, winter, man, butter, beer, or weather. Now some words sound totally different like (I will give translations after the word) Gift-poison, wald-forest, kopf-head, schmrez-pain, or baum-tree. find it amazing that if you listen clostly to what they are saying, you actually uunderstand one or two words then that gives you the basic gist of the thought or sentence. I also think that German (with all due repect to all Germans) is one of the choppiest languages. I do think that "to je(ye) pero" or "this is a pen" sounds smoother that "das ist griffel" I think that this shows how languages can be similar in many ways.

Slovakia in Brief

Slovakia is cosidered "Undiscovered" by some. It is only about 10 years old and has a languadge that is similar to Russian, Czech, Slovien, and Polish. Slovakia is devided into reigons called krys. Three of the major krys are Kosicky, Presovsky, and Banstoristricky. Slovaks enjoy many sport and activites but There favorite is deffinetly hokey. (Hokej) There is a slovak league called extraliga that has different teams from slovak cities play hokey. In slovak hokej, there are no fights because they are not only strick, but hokej is all about the fans. If a bad call is made, all fans start wisteling like crazy. Kosice and many other cities in Europe have main walking streets with shops and bars and restaurants. In Kosice, these streets are called Hlavna or Main Street. When some people say that slovakia is in Eastern Europe, slovaks say that they are in Central Europe. Almost all the slovak People speak Czech too. That is because Czech and Slovak are very alike. I hope you learned a lot about this amazing country, and remember to check out Kosiceslovakia.blogspot.com!