I’ve been trying to learn Czech for about a year now, and it’s proving brutal. It’s easy enough to memorise the useless phrases I hear, but retaining anything I actually need seems impossible. A few months ago, a friend joked I was a “nechutně bohatý” (disgustingly rich). I replied “nejsem nechutně bohatý” (I’m not disgustingly rich), and I’ve remembered this phrase ever since. On the other hand, I’ve learned to ask for a restaurant menu countless times and still forget how to say it.

But failing to remember words isn’t the worst kind of forgetting. Oh no, that award goes to when you forget everything you know. Seriously. Everything. Last week, a waitress asked what I wanted to drink and I couldn’t remember a single Czech word. Eventually, I said “zeleninový čaj” (vegetable tea) instead of “zelený čaj” (green tea). So that was cool and wasn’t embarrassing.

Then again, it wasn’t as bad as when I asked an old Czech lady for directions to the badminton court and said: “Co je badminton?” (What is badminton?) The poor woman looked like she was deciding whether I was trying to be philosophical or if there was something wrong with me.

I tell myself I’m cheering these people up: that waitress isn’t going to forget the time the foreign idiot asked for vegetable tea. But putting a positive spin on it never works. I don’t want to be the foreign clown making people laugh with my idiotic antics wherever I go. Sometimes I want to say: “I know I sound like an idiot in Czech, but I’m relatively intelligent when I speak my own language.” I’ve even learned the phrase: “Jsem vlastně docela inteligentní, když mluvím anglicky,” (I’m actually quite intelligent when I speak English). But my pronunciation is so weird that Czechs don’t believe me when I say it.

My other frustration is that most Czechs refuse to speak Czech with me. If you go to England and speak English then people will reply in English. But as soon as Czechs hear my pronunciation they reply in English (or worse still, German). Imagine that. It’s akin to a Czech moving to the UK to practice their English, and when they get there everyone replies in Polish.

There are some things I like about the battle to learn Czech though: you find yourself saying things you’d never say in your mother tongue. Last week, I was talking to a girl in a club when I heard this come out of my mouth: “Dnes jsem jedla pizzu, nebylo to moc zdravé” (Today I ate pizza, it wasn’t very healthy). I’d never get away with saying something that banal in my own language; well, not without the girl thinking I was mentally ill. Then again perhaps she did think that; I couldn’t understand her reply anyway.

There’s also something hilarious about using a language you’re not fluent in. It’s like being transported back to the time when you were a small child: you can’t articulate what you want properly and have a license to say anything. That being said, trying to learn Czech seems so difficult right now that if I was a “nechutně bohatý” I’d forgo this childlike experience and hire a full-time translator instead.

*First published in Milk & Honey (České Budějovice, Czech Republic)