The Foreigner's Guide to Living in Slovakia

What do you do if you speak little to no Slovak and need to ask for something? Well, it depends on your personality. Some might throw their reservations to the wind and use hand gestures, facial expressions, or any kind of body language to make themselves understood. For other who are more self-conscious or plain shy, they might simply decide to do without. For these kinds of people, particularly, it helps when you can memorize or become familiar with some of the vocabulary needed to complete your task.

When I first moved to Slovakia, knew no one, and didn’t speak the language, I sometimes went for days without fresh cheese or cold-cuts of meat because I simply didn’t know what or how to ask for at the butcher or deli counter, and I was too embarrassed to try to make myself understood. Add to that, that I didn’t know the amount of what I wanted measured in grams, there was no way I was going to try to ask for anything. So I sometimes went hungry if the selection of pre-packaged foods was uninspiring.

Nowadays, even the small towns in Slovakia have supermarkets with a lot of variety in pre-packaged fresh meats and cheeses. This has changed from the time I arrived in Slovakia in 1999.

Looking up words in a bilingual dictionary is easy, but locating whole phrases that cover a certain topic is much more difficult to find. So I decided that I would create some typical dialogs in Slovak that might be heard in a variety of locations where a person might need to buy or ask for something. All of these dialog entries are tagged so they can be grouped and accessed though the slovak_dialogs tag.

Dialogs will include asking for foods at a deli counter, such as something found in a grocery store; a dialog between a ticket teller and a traveler at a train station; and between a postal worker and a customer at a post office.

If you have other suggestions for additional dialogs that my be helpful, be sure to leave a comment.

• 2 comments