My bedroom is a minefield of a hundred different cluttered objects, and I paid the price for this untidiness on Friday night.
The space is effectively partioned into two distinct sections; with the constituent parts of a bed delineating them, and it so happened I'd seen something I needed across the 'impassable' side of the room.
In order to get it (it was a DVD) I stepped up onto the table which houses the keyboard I am typing on, and then shifted my weight onto an askance computer table, intending to use it as a bridge across to the cabinet on which the DVD sat.
The moment my foot made contact with the computer table, I fell through it, landing on the floor some three or four feet below, back-first.
I lay there for two or three minutes, busy exhausting the supply of expletives that I know, and breathing hard. I wondered idly whether I'd broken something, but in truth the damage is superficial - I can feel my back every time I move sharply, and I wince when obliged to do certain motions with my arms. The (laboured) point I wish to make here is that my movement is restricted. I have to think about how to minimise discomfort prior to doing something - it's all un-natural, and forced.
Trying to learn Serbian is the same, and I was thinking about this when sitting with my note-pad, trying to write words in Cyrillic earlier.
I read Cyrillic letter-by-letter, one at a time, and after a couple of seconds am able to deduce that Восна is 'Bosnia'.
Of course, when I see the word in my familiar Latin alphabet, there is no hiatus for calculation, and I am not even able to understand how I read what I read, such is the rapidity of the action. It is like magic, with no conscious process taking place at all.
It is as though my mind fell off the computer table, too, and is having to be deliberate in all that it does lest it sustains further damage.
As I write, there is only one word in Cyrillic that I can read as naturally as I can its English equivalent, and that is the name of Croatia: Хрватска.I don't know why this should be the case, but it is.
I don't know which is best, to read B-O-S-N-A letter-by-letter, or to see 'HRVATSKA' as a composite, beautiful whole, because there is no philosophy or science of language learning that I have happened upon. You just have to sit copying out the alphabet, and the names of countries, and cities, and 'I don't speak Serbian' and 'it is a pleasure to meet you' in these awkward barbed-wire characters.
My back will heal long before the alphabetic schism in my brain is resolved. I take it as a good sign that I am reading the Latin 'y' as a Cyrillic 'u', though - this is the first of many steps.
