Comprehension test

This week felt like a long Albanian language comprhension test. I use my Shqip everyday for basic everyday type things, but this week I came to Tirana to participate in a workshop on HIV/AIDS being held by World Vision. Since the workshop was for Albanian churches and there were only 3 Americans participating (me, one other PCV and a missionary who has lived here for 11 years), most of the content was in Albanian. I think I did pretty well for comprehension, especially on the technical parts (many of the words are actually the same) and I was able to participate in some of the discussions. Where I got lost the most was when we started to talk about things having to do with the religious aspects. As I'm not particularly Christian, I tend to zone out when people are talking about the Bible anyway (even in English). So when everyone was talking about the Bible in Albanian, I kind of got lost. This training brought up some other issues about being a non-Christian working with a Christian organization, but I think I will leave that for another post.

My second challenge for comprehension was a film. One of the biggest test for how well you understand a language is being able to understand movies. Verdict when I tried to watch a Spanish movie with Albanian subtitles? Kuptova! (I understood). I was able to follow much more of the story from the subtitles than from the speaking, which says to me that my Albanian is officially better than my Spanish. Between the two languages I was able to get not only the main idea of the movie, but also actually understand most of the story (I missed a few character points that I was able to look up later online). So overall, I think that this week I passed the test!