Dusty Parallel Universe

When I first arrived in Belgrade I felt like I’d discovered a slightly neglected parallel universe. I suppose I’d expected to find a poor, crumbling example of a failed Eastern Bloc state (and in many ways I suppose I had). But, as is always the case, it was the little things – the creature comforts - that convinced me that this place was in no way inferior to our own world, just… well… different.

The family I stayed with had all the accessories and appliances one would expect to find in any normal, urban world: multiple colour TVs, home PC, washing machine, etc. But I’d never heard of these manufacturers or seen these models before. ‘Maybe in this universe Beta had won the war against VHS’, I remember thinking. They hadn’t, of course, but it was a thought.

Once I got my head around the idea that an upwardly mobile society could exist without the bigheaded boys from Tefal, I started to embrace this distinctly dusty new world I was seeing for the first time.

I turned on the television (which was to become my best friend and personal language tutor during my time in the protective box) and was shocked to find a graphic rape scene being broadcast at 2pm. ‘That’s different’, I thought again.

I flicked around the seemingly endless choice of Serbian channels. Some of them reminded me of the Fast Show’s piss-take sketches of third-world broadcasting - I hadn’t expected such dire notions of broadcasting to really exist outside the sarcastic world of British comedy.

With my jaw resting slightly above my lap, I explored the multi-faceted world of television in Belgrade. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but I could see that they were saying it with passion – i.e. shouting and gesticulating a lot.

I came across TV Palma Plus – the cream (the curdled, yellowing cream) of Serbian music TV – and was left in stitches by the Turkish yodelling of the singers and daft costumes of the performers (probably the height of fashion in Uzbekistan). To this day I’m not sure whether Palma Plus is supposed to be a comedy channel or a serious music channel.

I stumbled across TV Pink, which seemed to have taken Palma Plus’s notion of entertainment to the next level; glamming it up to the max (Palma Plus with Rhinoplasty and big band Arabic jazz!). ‘That’s different’, I thought again.

It was thanks to TV Pink, B92 and the now defunct BK TV that I learnt my first lessons in Serbian. I learnt numbers thanks to the regularly repeated advertisements for sex chat lines: sexy (cheap & nasty) Serbian female voices alluringly uttering “nula cetiri jedan, dvesta dvesta. Uuuuu, cekam te… pozuri!” (041 200 200. Ooooo, I’m waiting for you… hurry!), which I found both informative and very funny.

Ads also helped me learn my first phrases, such as ‘vrlo pristojan sok’ (very decent fruit cordial) or ‘volimo Ramu, zuti margarin’ (We love Rame, yellow margarine) and the classic ‘pa to je neka magija’ (well that’s some sort of magic).

The fact that Serbian broadcasters don’t dub foreign programmes is also a great help to those trying to learn the language. Once you can read the Cyrillic alphabet, you are able to listen to English and simultaneously read the Serbian translation – a great learning aid (and eventually you’ll realise how very poor some of the television translations are).

In addition to TV, I also used my mobile phone to help learn the language – typing words that stuck in my head into a text message that I saved and accessed a few times a day until the words were duly learnt.

To this day I have never had a formal lesson in the language, and I am proud to say that I am now ‘relatively’ fluent.

I was also recently told that I am fluent in Croatian by a Croatian girl I met in London, which is great because I’d never met a Croat before and found it amazing that I could learn a language I’d never even heard simply by learning the language of a neighbouring country.

Perhaps that should be used as a slogan to lure linguists to the Balkans – learn a language of the former Yugoslavia and get five languages (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnjacki, Bosanski and Montenegrin) to put on your CV for the price of one…

I’m getting a bit sarcastic now, which usually means it’s time to shut up for a while.

Next time we’ll talk about how simply learning the language is not enough to develop an understanding of the Serbs.