Co to znamená?

What does it mean, indeed?

I've been pretty frustrated with my language skills of late. Mainly this is the product of trying to jump into reading a collection of conference papers I picked up that are written in Czech and Slovak. I thought I'd forgo the Slovak, since I've never studied Slovak in the least, so I started reading the first two or three articles in Czech.

Now, I don't want to say my efforts met without success. Let's just say that this wasn't the most efficient use of my time. Granted, my tempo was slowed considerably by my desire to look up all the words I don't know (a terribly high number), which slowed the pace quite a bit. But it was still laborious. I was reading at a rate of maybe three pages an hour. At that tempo I'll never be able to do any significant research.

Then today during break, while I was waiting for the lecture to begin, I started in on the next article in the book, which was in Slovak, just to see what I could understand, since I had nothing else to do and about 10 minutes to kill.

And the hell of it is that I seemed to get through the Slovak article much more easily. As in, I was reading the damn thing at something resembling a normal reading pace. Moreover, I was actually understanding probably 80 percent of it, all without benefit of a dictionary.

I realize that Czech and Slovak are very closely related languages, sometimes even classed as members of a subgroup of the West Slavic branch of Slavic languages. That said, I still can't figure out why I can read in the language I've never studied much more quickly than I can in the language I've been learning for most of the past four years, particularly when my ability to understand Slovak is wholly dependent on my knowledge of Czech. Crazy, no?

OK, so there are a few potentially mitigating circumstances. I had lower expectations when I started, reading for general comprehension rather than direct translation and even then not expecting to be able to rough out much at all. And, Slovak, I'm told has fewer words than Czech, which perhaps spares me from encountering lots of new or unfamiliar vocabulary, as is too often the case for me with Czech. And, probably, it didn't hurt that all those vocabulary words I had to look up to get through the first few articles in Czech perhaps came in handy for reading stuff in Slovak on the same theme.

Still, it puzzled me.

Don't get me wrong; I was thrilled to have done so well. And this is certainly welcome encouragement at a time when I kept thinking I was going to have to abandon course because I didn't think my language skills would permit me to do extensive research in Czech, let alone Slovak. So that's good.

It was also good that, when the lecture started, I concentrated really hard and understood about 90 percent of the talk, which is phenomenal from my standpoint.

It now remains to be seen how this translates to the final exam I have to take tomorrow morning. At least I already completed my report for my fellowship, complete with the grade I received "or think I will receive."